Choke by Chuck Palahniuk

From Barnes & Noble

The Barnes & Noble Review
Chuck Palahniuk, author of the dangerously brilliant Fight Club, pulls no punches in his latest novel, Choke. Once again, Palahniuk invites us to experience the underground, church-basement-dwelling world of the 12-step program. Only this time we're not in for testicular, bone, or skin cancer; this time we're dealing with sexual addiction. Not that former med student Victor Mancini has a problem, 'cause he doesn't. But when it comes to getting a little action, where better to go?

In Choke, as in all of Palahniuk's work, we hear the echoes of writers as diverse as Jonathan Swift, Don DeLillo, George Saunders, Kurt Vonnegut, and Bret Easton Ellis. But Palahniuk's voice is so unique, and his perspective so specific and fresh, one can hardly call his fiction derivative. Brazenly addressing our sexual excesses, our obsession with death, and our yearning for love, Palahniuk paints a horrific but ultimately fascinating portrait of the 21st-century psyche whose effect is much like bearing witness to an accident: Gruesome as it is, it is impossible not to look. (Cary Goldstein)

From the Publisher

Victor Mancini, a medical-school dropout, is an antihero for our deranged times. Needing to pay elder care for his mother, Victor has devised an ingenious scam: he pretends to choke on pieces of food while dining in upscale restaurants. He then allows himself to be “saved” by fellow patrons who, feeling responsible for Victor’s life, go on to send checks to support him. When he’s not pulling this stunt, Victor cruises sexual addiction recovery workshops for action, visits his addled mom, and spends his days working at a colonial theme park. His creator, Chuck Palahniuk, is the visionary we need and the satirist we deserve.

Newsday

Palahniuk is one of the freshest, most intriguing voices to appear in a long time. He rearranges Vonnegut's sly humor, DeLillo's mordant social analysis, and Pynchon's antic surrealism (or is it R. Crumb's?) into a gleaming puzzle palace all his own.

San Francisco Examiner

Palahniuk displays a Swiftian gift for satire, as well as a knack for crafting mesmerizing sentences that loom with stark, prickly prose and repetitive rhythms.

L.A. Weekly

Palahniuk's language is urgent and tense, touched with psychopathic brilliance, his images dead-on accurate....[He] is an author who makes full use of the alchemical powers of fiction to synthesize a universe that mirrors our own fiction as a way of illuminating the world without obliterating its complexity.

Book Magazine

With passionless sex replacing purposeless violence as the narrative piston, Palahniuk's latest book functions like a companion novel to the notorious Fight Club. Victor Mancini is a backsliding sexaholic who numbs himself through random couplings on the way to twelve-step meetings. A medical school dropout, he visits his ailing mother at her nursing home, paying her exorbitant bills by choking on dinner at a different restaurant each day, making heroes of his rescuers, then dunning them for money. ("People will jump through hoops for you if you make them feel like a god," he explains.) Clearly, neither plausibility nor coherence are priorities for Palahniuk. His subversive riffs conjure a kind of jump-cut cinema of the diseased imagination, resulting in an outlandish allegory that is as brutally hilarious as it is relentlessly bleak. Even though the author's excesses and repetitions occasionally grate on the reader's nerves, it's hard not to love a guy whose "bordello of the subconscious" spawns "hypno lap dances" with the likes of Emily Dickinson and Eleanor Roosevelt.
—Don McLeese

(Excerpted Review)

Publishers Weekly

While it's always interesting to hear authors read their own work, this production is not likely to prompt a narrating career for Palahniuk (Fight Club) on par with his literary accomplishments. That's not to say, however, that his style doesn't work with this offbeat story of a sex-addicted medical school dropout whose gift is pretending to choke in restaurants and reaping the sympathy checks of the people who "save" him in order to pay for the care of his sick mother. Palahniuk reads with a husky, occasionally whiny voice that's rushed and intense. At times it seems like he's not reading at all, but reciting the novel from memory as he paces the floor with a cup of coffee in one hand and the fingers of the other pressed to his forehead while a cigarette smolders away in the ashtray. He brings a unique sensibility and opts for inflections that other narrators probably would not. After the book implores listeners to turn away and go no further in Chapter 1, for instance, Palahniuk reads the words "Chapter 2" in a tone of voice that says, "OK, you asked for it." That's a fitting sentiment for those who choose to listen, as this bizarre story is by turns hilarious and depressing, read in an idiosyncratic manner by an idiosyncratic author. Based on the Doubleday hardcover (Forecasts, Apr. 2, 2001). (Apr.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

Palahniuk (Fight Club; Invisible Monsters) once again demonstrates his faith in the credo that before things get better, they must get much, much worse. Like previous Palahniuk protagonists, Victor Mancini is young and prematurely cynical, a med school dropout whose eerily detached narration of the banal horrors of everyday existence gives way to a numbed account of nihilistic carnage. Cruising sex-addict meetings for action, Victor enjoys bathroom trysts with nymphomaniacs on short prison furloughs, focused on maximizing his sexual highs. During the working day, he is trapped in a 1734 colonial theme park, where the entire self-medicated staff blearily endures abusive school tours while hiding out from the world. Victor supports his mother, who is in the hospital, stricken with Alzheimer's; she is wasting away, and despite the misery she put him through in childhood (revealed in an increasingly horrific series of flashbacks), he wants to be a good boy and take care of her. This becomes challenging when Victor is seduced by a strange hospital worker calling herself Dr. Marshall, who shows him his mother's diary; it describes her self-impregnation by a holy relic she believes to be the foreskin of Jesus. This has a profound effect on Victor, who is stunned by the possibility that there may be some good in him after all. Victor is even more pathetic than Palahniuk's previous antiheroes, in that the world he creates for himself (a carnivalesque m lange of theme park, geriatric ward and asylum) is actually more horrific than the one he seeks to escape. Still, the novel showcases the author's powers of description, character development and attention-getting dialogue handily enough to give this dark meditation on addiction a distinctive and humorous twist. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

In the course of his three novels (e.g., Fight Club), Palahniuk has become a master of depicting the dark and depraved underbelly of our society through the voices of mordantly existential protagonists. Choke is no exception. This time around, readers are ushered into a world of sexaholics, historical theme parks, and other bizarre matters by Victor Mancini, a medical school dropout who has resorted to fake choking in restaurants in order to pay the hospital expenses for his elderly mother, Ida. Ida also happens to be an anarchist whose social terror campaigns made Victor's childhood less than stable. Such is the universe of Palahniuk, who calls the norms of our society into question by presenting us with a parallel world where most of what we hold to be true is exposed as hallow or insane. His writing is as good and as funny as ever, and like many other Palahniuk characters, Victor is quite memorable. Some readers may be shocked and even repulsed by much of the subject matter here. Still, it is recommended for most public and academic libraries. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 1/01.] "Library Journal" Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

The author of Fight Club takes as the hero of his fourth novel an unlovable loser who doesn't blame Mom. Victor Mancini always knew she was crazy, but he loves her all the same. Ida's in a nursing home now, and Victor works two jobs to keep her there. The legit one involves donning breeches and wig to playact at Colonial Dunsboro, a fake 18th-century village. The other consists of pretending to choke in fancy restaurants, which nets him the sympathy of the saps who perform the Heimlich maneuver and then send checks, hoping to perpetuate the warm glow of their momentary heroism. In between choking spells, Victor listens patiently to Ida's reminiscences of her days as a practicing anarchist, on the road with him when she wasn't in jail and he wasn't in foster care. His father? Victor doesn't know, but he might find out from Ida's diary—too bad it's written in Italian. Victor, however, has other things to occupy his mind. There's always the Internet and his favorite Website featuring photos of an obese man who bends over and lets a trained orangutan put chestnuts up his ass. Victor can protect his stupid slacker pal Denny, usually clapped in the stocks at Dunsboro, or help him lug home the enormous rocks he collects. When all else fails, Victor gets up close and personal with any willing, lust-besotted female from the 12-step sexaholic program he attends. But he does wonder now and then about his dad—until a doctor at the nursing home translates the diary and informs him that he was conceived from the DNA of a sacred relic: the putative foreskin of Jesus Christ. Hey, Victor doesn't believe it either. Then, finally, his mother tells him the truth. Palahniuk is acheerful nihilist with a mordant wit and a taste for scatological humor. Fair warning: some may find his language and imagery offensive.

What People Are Saying

Bret Easton Ellis
Maybe our generation has found its Don DeLillo.

Thom Jones
Even I can't write this well.

Product Details

• Interviews & Essays
• Read an Excerpt

Interviews & Essays

Bill was the first man I ever met who called himself a sex addict. This was in a church conference room, on a Thursday night, where a couple dozen men and women sat in plastic chairs around a table stained with poster paint and glue. Bill is a big guy, wearing three layers of plaid flannel shirts, with a big square chin and a booming gruff voice.

This is just after Christmas, the first Christmas in almost 20 years that Bill says he didn't spend with his wife and kids. Instead, he put on a dress and went downtown to an adult bookstore and gave blow jobs all day.

This is the world of sexual compulsives. One by one, almost everybody around that table, very ordinary folks, young and old, hip and square, men and woman, they took turns telling about their week's worth of sex with prostitutes, lingerie models, and strangers. They talked about Internet sex, public-bathroom sex, and telephone sex. None of these people were anyone you'd look at twice on the street, but their secret lives were amazing.

Everybody in my family does something compulsively. My brother exercises. My mother gardens. I write. That's part of the reason why I was at this meeting.

This is the rest of the reason:

Ten-plus years ago, my brother joked that the best place to meet women was at support groups for sexually irresponsible people.

At the time, he was engaged to a beautiful woman. She was funny and charming and looked just like Vanna White. The two of them had met at work, and my brother knew about the support groups because she went to them. They'd almost gotten married, but he'd heard some rumors about what she did while he was gone on business trips.

To resolve the issue, before he left for his next trip, he put a voice-activated tape recorded under the bed in his apartment. When he came home, the tape was run all the way through. Rewinding it and listening, he says, was the hardest thing he's ever done in his life.

On the tape, his fiancée was drunk and bringing home guy after guy -- to his bed. The second-hardest thing he's ever done was confronting her with the tape and ending their engagement.

Today, he's married with a beautiful family, married to someone else.

He told me this story one summer while we drove to Idaho to help identify a body the police said might be our father. The body was found, shot, next to the body of a woman, in a burned-down garage in the mountains outside Kendrick, Idaho.

This was the summer of 1999. The summer the Fight Club movie came out. We went to our father's house in the mountains outside of Spokane, trying to track down some X-rays that showed the two vertebrae fused in Dad's back after a railroad accident left him disabled.

My father's place in the mountains was beautiful, hundreds of acres, wild turkeys and moose and deer everywhere. On the road up to the house, there was a new sign. It was next to a boulder that lay beside the road. It said, "Kismet Rock." We had no idea what the sign meant.

Once at a toga party, I was drinking with a friend, Cindy, and she said, "Let me tell you about my mother. My mother gets married a lot." It was such a great line I used it in Invisible Monsters. I knew exactly what Cindy meant.

Part of visiting my dad was always meeting his latest girlfriend. Or wife.

Before my brother and I could find the X-rays, the police called to say the body was Dad's. They'd used dental records we'd shipped to them earlier.

At the trial of the man who murdered him, it came out that my father had answered a personal ad placed by a woman whose ex-husband had threatened to kill her and any man that he ever found her with. The title of the personal ad was "Kismet." My father was one of five men who answered it. He was the one she chose.

This was the dead woman found beside my father. She and my father had gone to her home to feed some animals before driving to my father's house, where he was going to surprise her with the "Kismet Rock" sign. A sort of landmark named for their new relationship.

Her ex-husband was waiting and followed them up the driveway. According to the court's verdict, he killed them and set fire to their bodies in the garage. They'd known each other for less than two months.

That first support group for sex addicts, I went because I wanted to understand my father. I wanted to know what he dealt with and why his life was girlfriend after girlfriend, wife after wife.

At the meeting in the church conference room, here were very everyday-looking people, telling stories that even their own spouses didn't know. I just sat there, and even though everyone was supposed to limit their sharing to a few minutes, we always ran out of time before everyone had to speak. People were so hungry to share their pain.

Several months after meeting Bill, after his story about blow jobs on Christmas Day, he came to the group upset. The fourth step in the 12-step process is to keep a record of your addiction, recording all your transgressions, past and present. Bill's wife had found his notebook. She'd told him she made copies, and -- if he didn't give her the kids, the money, the house, the cars, and then move to another state -- she was going to give the copies to all his family and coworkers.

Bill was frantic, and his only way out, he told everyone, was to go home and kill her and kill himself.

He seemed so resolved.

I kept thinking, This is how it happens. All those newspaper stories about murder/suicides, this is how they happen.

The group got Bill calmed down. He wept. A few weeks later, he and his wife had resolved to stay married and face his addiction, together.

During this time, a friend introduced me to a woman. This was at breakfast in a restaurant, and it was funny because her name was Marla. Like Marla Singer in Fight Club. I'd never met a real Marla, and it turned out she's a therapist who works with sexual compulsives. Piece by piece, the ideas and themes of Choke were coming together.

I wanted to write about the moment when your addictions no longer hide the truth from you. When your whole life breaks down. That's the moment when you have to somehow choose what your life is going to be about. Doping yourself with sex or drugs or food, or choosing something like writing, body building, gardening. True, in a way this is trading one compulsive behavior for another, but at least with the new one, you're choosing it.

Funny, but all my former junkie friends are either fervent Christians or triathletes. Nothing in half measures.

As Paige Marshall says in the book, "You have to trade your youth for something." With Choke I wanted to show someone actively choosing their future, instead of perpetuating their past.

Here, I want to tell you how lovely and clever my brother's former fiancée was.

I want you to know how happy it felt to see Bill resolve to save his marriage.

I want to tell you how my father spent years with my brother and I, building huge model train sets with papier-mâché mountain ranges and working streetlights. We'd go into town, to Bailey's Toys and Hobbies, and buy a new locomotive for our birthdays. We'd glue specks of sand, just so, to create the perfect miniature roadbed for our tracks. Yeah, it's sounds like compulsive behavior, but it was so sweet.

Here at the end, I want to thank you, for your time and attention. And thank you for taking a chance with my books. This is the story behind the story.

I'll shut up now,

--Chuck

Read an Excerpt

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Excerpted from Choke by Chuck Palahniuk Copyright 2002 by Chuck Palahniuk. Excerpted by permission of Anchor, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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