Choke: A Novel

Product Information

During his childhood, his mother would kidnap him from his various foster parents, though every time they would eventually be caught and he would again be remanded over to the child welfare agency. Needing to pay elder care for his mother, Victor has devised an ingenious scam: he pretends to choke on pieces of food. The deluded little rube who thought he could ever earn enough, know enough, own enough, run fast enough, hide well enough. Later, Denny is fired from the job and begins to build his "dream home" by collecting stones from around the city. But then Harry winds up dead, and the obvious suspect is Chuck Chandler who's been sleeping with Harry's wife.

We later learn that Paige is a patient in the hospital who wears a doctor's uniform and impersonates a real doctor. Palahniuk's grotesque romp aims to skewer the ruthless superficiality of the fashion world and winds up with a tale as savagely glib as what it derides.

While it didn't sound like a 4th grader's book report in front of the class, it was obvious that the reader was just *reading*. A man who believes strangers saving him from choking in a restaurant is not only a financial resource but an expression of love and sainthood, Victor is wonderfully human and am incredibly sympathetic character. Victor Mancini, a dropout from medical school, has devised a complicated scam to pay for his mother's elder care: Pretend to be choking on a piece of food in a restaurant and the person who "saves you" will feel responsible for the rest of his life. The same way you will always remember that the first rule of fight club is you do not talk about fight club, you will remember that "this" or "that" isn't the right word, but it's the first word that comes to mind. But it was totally mindless and my grandma gave it to me, so now we share that "thrilling" experience.

If this was a movie, I would have half expected some soaring violin strings to clue me in that this is an important moment. However, taken on its own merit without comparing it to his first book, Choke is a taut thriller, a who-done-it that moves along at an exciting pace.I've read all his published work to date and it remains enjoyable though engaging in highly repetitive sex and society set pieces. And when I say his plot is secondary, I don't mean it in the way the plot was secondary (or nonexistant) in Ethan Frome.