Choke - Softcover

Chuck Palahniuk

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0099422689 ISBN 13: 9780099422686

Publisher: Vintage, 2002

Synopsis

Victor Mancini has devised a complicated scam to pay for his mother's hospital care: pretend to be choking on a piece of food in a restaurant and the person who 'saves you' will feel responsible for you for the rest of their lives. Multiply that a couple of hundred times and you generate a healthy flow of cheques, week in, week out.

Victor also works at a theme park with a motley group of losers, cruises sex addiction groups for action, and visits his mother, whose Alzheimer's disease now hides what may be the startling truth about his parentage.

About this title

Review:

Imagine watching live images of a runaway stolen bus on TV, and imagine that that same bus comes crashing through your own street, maybe even your own wall, into your existence, and you will have imagined what it is like to read Chuk Palahniuk's third novel, Choke. This is satirical literature for the DVD surround-sound generation. As with his debut novel, Fight Club, which has since been adapted into a critically acclaimed film, Palahniuk's central character, Victor Mancini, is a cruiser of support groups, this time sexual addiction groups. Victor is reminiscent of Patrick Bateman, Bret Easton Ellis's central character in American Psycho, and of David Bell, Don Dellillo's character in Americana. He is a social outsider, psychologically fragmented, unable to function in modern society, uncertain of his true identity, a con-man diner struggling to connect to other diners in a godless and consumerist society.

This is a novel full of big ideas, sharp social commentaries; through Victor's actions and his memories of his dysfunctional crackpot mother, a world is revealed in which addictive behaviour is a way of escaping the banalities that pass for realities, a world which could end with a "discreet, tasteful announcement". However, Victor is also a redeemer, his selfish actions, blackly comic, bring meaning into the lives of the strangers he cons, turning him into a creator of heroes, each one claiming to have saved Victor Mancini from choking to death, each one Victor's benefactor, saving them from the emptiness of their existence.

In portraying Victor's attempt to condense his identity from the chaotic waters of his life, Palahniuk reminds us of the struggles that we all face as individuals in our fast and puzzling new millennium. His prose is quick and inventive, his plot never predictable, and he has the unerring ability to make the reader question himself in the context of his fiction, a mark of truly good writing. --Iain Robinson

Review:

"Palahniuk's grotesque, exaggerated portrait of American society certainly isn't pretty, but it grips like a vice all the same" (The Times)

"A wonderful writer with a raw take on modern woes" (The Face)

"Mining a dark vein opened by Bret Easton Ellis and George Saunders, Palahniuk specialises in producing nightmarish visions of American society that manage to be both repugnant and hilarious - the reckless brilliance of his imagination keeps you turning the pages" (Literary Review)

"A raw and vital book, punctuated with outrageous, off-the-wall moments" (New York Times)

"The pungent imagery, the witty twists, the chunky rhythms are great" (Financial Times)

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0099422689
• ISBN 13: 9780099422686
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 293