Choke
by Chuck Palahniuk

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Book Reviews of Choke

Book Review: Choke on this
Summary: 5 Stars

Chuck Palahniuk takes full advantage of the shock effect and lures his audience of young minds into his eccentric world of dark philosophy. The anarchic escapades of our protagonist, Victor Mancini, serves as a vehicle for the authors satirical take on our society. His works certainly cater to mainstream readers yearning for something different.

The author takes pop culture how it's given to him, digests it, and spits it out in the form of Victor Mancinni, a medical school dropout, and blooming sex addict in a 12 step program. At this point he realized all the virtues his mom had taught him were lies.

Victor dines out in bourgeoise restaurants and deliberately chokes on food waiting to be rescued. In the aftermath, these good semaritans sympathesize and send him birthday cards every week, like he was their own child. He learned this during childhood when he almost died eating a corndog.

His facade for this scenario is that he's staying the underdog to contrast with his saviors superiority, claiming that his saviors do this to save themselves. He secretely likes to think that hes putting adventure into peoples lives full of incompletes. The truth is that hes only doing it for the money.

He had hope, goals, promises of impossible happiness if he worked hard enough, suffered, and tried to help others for this is what his mommie told him.

Another example of Victors christ complex, is when he finds an opportunity to fake a scapegoat and starts admitting to crimes that senile old ladies accused him of doing, when he had not committed any at all. "The Titanic thing, I did that. That Kennedy assasination deal, yeah, that was me. The AIDS bug? Sorry. Me, again." For some reason, this sparks compassion into the old wrecks and creates a more peacful living environment at Saint Anthony's Medical Institute.

In the closing of our tale, Victor crosses the line between delusion and psychosis into believing that he is Jesus Christ and says " I want to become a better person." Ironically, when he actually attempts in helping his institutionalized mother in feeding her a ridiculously excessive amount of pudding, she chokes and dies.

Every one of these scenes are portrayed as being very anti-climactic. As excitement is built up it takes a sudden dive back to nowhere. For him, the only way to make ends meet is to create an alternative reality.

To summarize, the plot and character go well together as they progress into psychosis hand in hand. The book is a study of absurdity; one disallusionment preceeding the other. The message of the novel seems ( I say "seems" because the dialougue is coated with messages upon messages that makes the book totally arbitrary; like the readers own working space) to be that one can get ahead in life, or solve a problem, by changing the way we percieve things. Ergo, truth is relative; you escape pain by constructing your own mental environment in a way that comforts you.

The beautiful way in which Chuck Palahnuk describes setting and actions using every literary device to the last detail counterbalances the negative aspects of his philosophy and makes the book easy to swallow. No pun intended.

Summary of Choke

"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

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