Product Description
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.

Amazon.com Review
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 (Average Customer Rating: 4.0 based on 467 reviews)

Gets a little too extreme for its own good...

Not as good as `Invisible Monsters' (his finest work) or `Fight Club' (his most popular) or even `Lullaby' (his most insanely creative), `Choke' has to settle for being merely good. It isn't great, and at times it is slightly bad, but at least it makes slightly more sense than `Diary' (his least satisfying). I am a fan of Chuck, because even when he is beneath himself he is still above many others.

Bad Palahniuk is still pretty darn good.

I have a few issues with `Choke', namely that it rides so heavy on the preposterous that each and every character starts to lose credibility before the conclusion of the novel, but those issues never deterred me from actually reading the novel. Chuck's style is very creative and absorbing, so even when I was rolling my eyes in disbelief, I was rolling them towards the page because I didn't want to stop reading. Chuck has a way of always keeping you guessing, intrigued enough (maybe it's all those moments that make you ask `can he really be serious?') to keep reading, keep barreling through in order to uncover the inspiration for all his madness.

`Choke' tells the story of Victor Mancini. He is an addict (of the most perverse kind), he is a loser who failed to go through with his big dreams and he comes from the most insanely unbelievable background imaginable.

Oh yeah; and he may be Jesus Christ.

The story weaves through Victor skipping his AA meetings to feed his addictions, visiting his dying mother in the hospital, working his pointless job at a colonial-era theme park and killing time with his best friend Denny at strip clubs and collecting rocks (I know, I know). In the meantime he meets Paige, a doctor at the hospital his mother is staying at. She seems convinced that a risky procedure could save his mothers life (I'm not going to tell you what she proposes, because it really would kill that `what the...' moment that it is bound to create). The question Victor faces is, does he really want to save anyone, let alone his mother?

Palahniuk is known for pushing the envelope, and I admire him for that. He knows how to hit us where it counts, how to engage the reader and turn his stomach at the same time he is turning his mind. My complaint here is that Chuck may have gone a little too far. Some of the scenes reach `American Psycho' amounts of explicitness, but unlike Bret Easton Ellis, Palahniuk doesn't know how to make his perversions intelligent. In the end we are left with a novel that thinks it is establishing a groundbreaking prose on the adult male but instead is rattling off a list of impulses we are all familiar with yet repulsed by in the same breath. It is entertaining in parts, mind-numbing in others, yet is always presented in Chuck's signature style, which makes anything readable.

Palahniuk has been hailed as the author who finally got men reading again (for I cannot see women fully enjoying his work) and for that he should be commended. The problem I have with that is that that statement paints men (his target audience) as generic Neanderthals who only appreciate literature if it is as graphic as it is simple. I'm not knocking Chuck, for like I said, I like him, but as an avid reader (and a male) I find it rather insulting that this is the literature we are expected to enjoy the most.
October 10, 2008

Funny, strange, disturbing, good

This is the first Palahniuk book I've read, and I look forward to reading more of his books.

Based upon the description of the book, this isn't one that I'd likely pick up to read...the redemption/recovery/whatever you call it of a sex addict just didn't seem that interesting. However, Palahniuk throws in enough twists and symbolism to make this a very entertaining read. The book was hard to put down.

The story was so graphic, that it was hard not to laugh every time he talked about "throating a dog", or his "white soldiers." The main character gets into some strange situations...every chapter is filled with another surprise.
October 10, 2008

I don't get it.

Like others, I saw the film Fight Club but had not read any of Palahniuk's books before. This book had been sitting on my TBR shelf for a while, and with the upcoming release of the movie I figured it was time to give it a try.

The word "sick" seems to occur frequently in reviews of Palahniuk's work. After reading this book I understand why. Many of the images in the book are quite disgusting, but "sick" is also a good word to describe the world as Palahniuk portrays it. Despite the high gross-out factor, this book is at times laugh out loud funny - indeed I could not decide if some of the scenes were for shock value or attempts at dark humor.

The protagonist Victor behaves in an appalling manner, but because the book is written in first person we can almost understand why and feel sympathetic towards him. However, whenever Victor starts to become likable, Palahniuk quickly does something to make us gag or laugh again. What a strange book.
October 05, 2008

Love (or maybe oblivion) and how to get it

Like Fight Club, Choke is kind of a short, biographical (and in parts sad, very sad) micro-history of the weird, their weirdnesses, and the world outside of our peripheral vision. Palahniuk turns up things that make me both jealous and glad that I'm not the subject of his work.

And it makes me want to read more of his books.
October 02, 2008

disapointing

This poor mans version of Fight Club is surprising ineffective. It seems that Palahniuk is a one trick pony, or maybe this is just the sophomore curse, it's unlikely that I'll trouble to find out, that's how disappointed I was. The characters, instead of representing everyman, seem to be faker than those on a TV sitcom. The story, instead of giving voice to the existential angst of a generation, is simply flaccid nonsense. There is nothing here but a feeble attempt to shock. Very disappointing
September 26, 2008

SIMILAR PRODUCTS

Survivor: A Novel
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Fight Club: A Novel
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Invisible Monsters
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Lullaby
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Diary: A Novel
by Chuck Palahniuk