Choke

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)

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.

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.

From The Critics

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 - Publisher's 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.

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.

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.