Product Description

Victor Mancini's a medical school dropout with a problem. He needs to pay for elder care for his mother, who's got Alzheimer's. So he comes up with the perfect scam: pretending to choke in upscale restaurants and getting “saved” by fellow diners who, feeling responsible for Victor's life, offer him financial support.

Meanwhile, he cruises sexual addiction recovery workshops and spends his days working at Colonial Dunsboro, where his stoner colleagues are sentenced to the stocks for any deviation from the colonial lifestyle. Oh, yeah, and he's desperate to find the truth of his paternity, which his addled mother suggests may be divine.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1780 in Books
• Published on: 2008-08-26
• Released on: 2008-08-26
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 304 pages

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

From 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. Author tour.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From 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.
- Heath Madom, "Library Journal"
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer 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.

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.

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.