ChokeA Novel

Palahniuk keeps the ugly, but adds the specificity that makes his twisted tale resonate
In Choke, the ugly details stack up like relentless Jenga blocks. Narrator and anti-hero Victor Mancini is a 24-year-old med-school dropout, aimless in the way many 24-year-olds are. But this 24-year-old med-school dropout happens to play an indentured servant for the minimum wage at a mock 18th century village called "Colonial Dunsboro." Victor's earnings go to support his institutionalized mother, who no longer recognizes the son she repeatedly abducted as a boy. Of course, said earnings aren't nearly enough; hence the scam that gives the book its title: Victor routinely fakes choking at restaurants — the good citizens who give him the Heimlich fancy themselves the boy's savior and can be counted on as financial benefactors for life. And, oh yes, Victor is a recovering sex addict. Or was: Choke opens with a fellow-addict named Nico astride him on the ladies room floor at the church where the pair should be attending this week's group-therapy session.

Where it heads from there might best be captured by the awful phrase, equal parts sinister and banal, that Victor deadpans with special relish: "For serious." As in: for serious, the preserved foreskin of Jesus Christ is a pivotal plot element. Yet even that non-sequitur fails to send Choke crashing into farce; the emotional integrity of the book holds. This is a sign of Chuck Palahniuk's maturation. Thematically, Choke is as monomaniacal as his iconic Fight Club, igniting and reigniting the same existential powder-keg between the male body — evolved for fighting and fornicating, hunting animals and making things — and a present that's disembodied, softened, mediated. (It's no accident that Victor works a service-industry job imitating the productive work of centuries past.) But where that earlier novel conflated the universal with the generic — its nameless narrator was a cipher for all post-industrial manhood — Choke displays the confidence of specificity. Victor Mancini's peculiarities, his impulses, his life and thought patterns, are nothing like yours or mine; it's the sting of surprise, not the balm of recognition, that makes descending to his particular reality worth the vertigo.