Choke
by Chuck Palahniuk
Doubleday
Following on the heels of Chuck Palahniuk's breakthrough "Fight Club" comes
"Choke," a work that, while somewhat more lucid than the half fantasy,
half reality of its predecessor, is written to be more shocking, more
disturbing than anything you've ever read. But just as watching porn gets boring
after the first money shot, "Choke" quickly loses its "good lord!" novelty and
founders on a weak plot.
Don't be mistaken — the first 100 pages of "Choke" are brilliant in their
weirdness. The protagonist, Victor Mancini, is a med-school dropout who works
part-time at a reconstructed colonial village (a la Williamsburg, Va.) and
attends sexaholic therapy groups to pickup women. Victor also goes to
restaurants nightly and intentionally chokes on his food, drawing someone
out of the crowd to give him the heimlich. Feeding the newly crowned hero
a sob story, he elicits support, usually in the form of checks (he even
says at one point, "It's not that I'm an ingrate, but if all you can cut
me is fifty bucks, next time just let me die. Okay? Or better yet, stand
aside and let some rich person be the hero").
As in "Fight Club," Palahniuk is at his best when exploring the psychological
world of group therapy. It's his chance to show off his knack for the extremely
offbeat, and his Sexaholics Anonymous meetings are populated by urban legends
— the guy hospitalized with a gerbil in his rectum, the woman caught covering
her body in peanut butter for her dog to lick off, the cheerleader who gave
head to the entire football team and had to have her stomach pumped. Of course,
by drawing on urban legends as a source of character, Palahniuk is saying that
the very problems such organizations try to correct are themselves myths, and
his ridicule is always aimed not at the people in the 12-step programs but the
system that put them there.
But "Choke" is an apt title, because after setting up the odd world of Victor
Mancini, Palahniuk can't seem to figure out what to do with it. The plot, emergent
only in the last 75 pages, feels concocted and out of place. The motivation of
many of the secondary characters turns out to be, oddly enough, mental instability;
Palahniuk steadfastly refuses to give them humanity, lives driven not by voices
in their heads but by wishes and hopes.
Victor is an exception. His voice is robust and conflicted, and while his life
is offbeat, his desires and motives are not. Victor, like so many of us, feels
at the end of his emotional rope, and he flips desperately between one-night
stands and his choking routine in search of affection. But Victor's salvation,
and the single driving force in the book, is his slow realization that for all
his cynical manipulation of those around him, his motivations are good — the
money he makes from his scams go to pay for his hospital-bound mother, and his
bathroom quickies are desperate searches for love. "Choke" is the story of Victor
coming to grips with the nice guy deep down inside him.
But the story of Victor's salvation — mapped by an absurd subplot about how he
may or may not be the second coming of Christ — is poorly fleshed out, and a
lot of his steps toward enlightenment come as over the top moments of clarity.
The success of "Fight Club" lies in its unremitting, cynical scope, its evocation
of an engrossing world view within which Tyler Durden has no choice but to go
insane. "Choke," on the other hand, merely skims the surface; beyond the quirky
expositions, it's hard for the reader to care about what's going on.
— Clay Risen (clay@flakmag.com)
