Victor Mancini has devised a scam to pay for his mother's medical care: pretend to be choking on a piece of food in a restaurant and the person who "saves" you will feel responsible for the rest of their lives. Multiply that by a couple of hundred times and you generate a healthy income.
Victor Mancini is a ruthless con artist. Victor Mancini is a med-school dropout who's taken a job playing an Irish indentured servant in a colonial-era theme park in order to help care for his Alzheimer's-afflicted mother. Victor Mancini is a sex addict. Victor Mancini is a direct descendant of Jesus Christ. All of these statements about the protagonist of Choke are more or less true. Welcome, once again, to the world of Chuck Palahniuk.
"Art never comes from happiness." So says Mancini's mother only a few pages into the novel. Given her own dicey and melodramatic style of parenting, you would think that her son's life would be chock-full of nothing but art. Alas, that's not the case. In the fine tradition of Oedipus, Stephen Dedalus, and Anthony Soprano, Victor hasn't quite reconciled his issues with his mother. Instead, he's trawling sexual-addiction recovery meetings for dates and purposely choking in restaurants for a few moments of attention. Longing for a hug, in other words, he's settling for the Heimlich.
Thematically, this is pretty familiar Palahniuk territory. It would be a pity to disclose the surprises of the plot, but suffice it to say that what we have here is a little bit of Tom Robbins's Another Roadside Attraction, a little bit of Don DeLillo's The Day Room, and, well, a little bit of Fight Club. Just as with Fight Club and the other two novels under Palahniuk's belt, we get a smattering of gloriously unflinching sound bites, including this skeptical bit on prayer chains: "A spiritual pyramid scheme. As if you can gang up on God. Bully him around."
Whether this is the novel that will break Palahniuk into the mainstream is hard to say. For a fourth book, in fact, the ratio of iffy, "dude"-intensive dialogue to interesting and insightful passages is a little higher than we might wish. In the end, though, the author's nerve and daring pull the whole thing off--just barely. And what's next for Victor Mancini's creator? Leave the last word to him, declaring as he does in the final pages: "Maybe it's our job to invent something better.... What it's going to be, I don't know." --Bob Michaels
Customer Reviews:
Avg. Customer Rating: 4.0 / 5.0
Well...THAT was graphic.:
Graphic and entertaining. In a good way, of course. I found the main character absolutely intriguing, and was delighted to read small excerpts from his past every once in a while. The rest of the characters all had a certain charm to them. The first-person narrative was great, and never exasperating. However, the book seemed to take too much time describing Victor's many sexual encounters, and not enough on his choking experiences.
I knew the main character was a sex addict and all, but... more info
"Dude" this book blows...:
So maybe I made the mistake of watching the film before I read the book, but I expected the book to be better--and it wasn't. In fact, the book enlightened me to the fact that the author attempts to be evocative, erotic & intellectual with this wannabe-doctor self-made genius of a man. The film, I think, was better because it took out some unnecessary "metaphors" of philosophical proportions. The dialogue seemed artificial, and yes--the book is as inflated as my review appears before you. It was fun... more info
Great Ideas:
Well, I didn't this book was that funny and written so smartly, a lot of jokes not only sexual jokes, but those about death are awesome... this is a great book for people who likes jokes and are not afraid of laughing at death, addictions and oder human abilities....
Gutsy readers only--this is not for the faint-hearted:
(First published in 2001, this book has been re-released because of the upcoming movie.) Choke tells the tale of Victor Mancini, a recovering sex-addict and medical school dropout. A story filled with piercing social commentary accented by creative storytelling. Palahniuk presents the personality of Mancini by way of disgusting, yet thought-provoking parallels and phrases in the same vein as a Physician's Desk Reference. A drug-addicted, baby-boomer mother, an overly dependent best friend, multiple... more info
