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Choke

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Editorial Review:

Victor Mancini's a medical school dropout with a problem. He needs to pay for elder care for his mother, who's got Alzheimer's. So he comes up with the perfect scam: pretending to choke in upscale restaurants and getting "saved" by fellow diners who, feeling responsible for Victor's life, offer him financial support.
Meanwhile, he cruises sexual addiction recovery workshops and spends his days working at Colonial Dunsboro, where his stoner colleagues are sentenced to the stocks for any deviation from the colonial lifestyle. Oh, yeah, and he's desperate to find the truth of his paternity, which his addled mother suggests may be divine.

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

• review
  This book was fun and vulgar. Read it if you DON'T have a weak stomach.

• I don't get the hype about this one.
  I've read a lot of Palahniuk's books and this is by far my least favorite. If you want something more interesting, read Survivor, Lullaby or my favorite, Invisible Monsters.

• "Outrageous" isn't the right word, but it's the one that comes to mind.
  
  Chuck Palahniuk is an author who writes boundary-pushing, perversely twisted, bizarrely funny, male-oriented fiction that isn't likely to appeal to most women and will offend a good number of men as well. Palahniuk could be described as an author for the `Maxim' generation but his novels are actually smarter than that. In fact, if you aren't easily offended, you'll find that Palahniuk delivers some of the most perceptive satire you're likely to find anywhere. Palahniuk writes dialogue and prose that... more info

• So they said it was Vulgar
  They've warned you, the book is vulgar. They've warned you it's not for the timid. You've been told to go away if you have a week stomach. If you can't handle the radicalness, you'd better turn around and go right back to the safest section in the bookstore.
  But, in reality, this book is not that vulgar. It doesn't make you queesy. It might be a bit foul for Bible Belters, but otherwise, I think Chuck Palahniuk is writing of as being disturbingly nasty, and that is not the case.
  Sure there are... more info

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