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Volume 3, Issue 11
Book Reviews
CHOKEby Chuck Palahniuk When Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club was released in 1996, it showcased a compelling new talent. The disorienting non-linear narrative, one-sentence jab paragraphs, sardonic awareness and intriguing devices (film reel transitions and soap making) all snapped together into a nifty puzzle. The disturbing pre-science of the Palahniuk's follow-up Survivor is also noteworthy. The original short story for Survivor, about a death cult, was published a week before the Heaven's Gate incident. The narrator of Survivor relates his surreal story aboard a doomed airliner running out of fuel on autopilot. Published in January 1999, Survivor predated the eerily similar demise of golfer Payne Stewart aboard a Lear jet ten months later. With the publication of his fourth novel, Choke, Palahniuk is back in his now familiar element of recovery group exploitation, absurdest scams and moping anarchists. Medical school dropout Victor Mancini is all about casual sex and casual nihilism. Victor's mother Ida, wasting away in the final stages of Alzheimer's, mistakes her son for any number of attorneys who defended her during her mischievous days of kidnapping Victor from foster parents and switching blonde hair dye bottles into brunette boxes. "There's an opposite to déja vu. They call it jamais vu. It's when you meet the same people or visit places, again and again, but each time is the first," says Victor of his mother's state of mind. However, for Palahniuk's coherent readership, Choke is simple deja vu. After a chance encounter in an airline bathroom, Victor has become addicted to informal sex sessions. He attends sexaholics meetings to hook up with other degenerates, using step four of the twelve step recovery process, the moral inventory, to tally up his conquests. Working at the historical theme park Colonial Dunsboro, Victor despises the snapshot-happy tourists who shoot Victor and his friend/ co-worker/ compulsive masturbator Denny. As employees at this dystopian Frontierland, Victor and Denny must remain historically authentic, which means no cigarettes, rock music hum-ming or newspaper reading on the job. Constant violations of these rules keep Denny locked in the stocks, watching as deformed chickens and drug-addled milk maids stagger about their dreary business. Then there is the choking scam. Victor goes out to eat and fake gagging fits. When chumps Heimlich Victor, "saving him," they also feel beholden to look after him. "Somebody saves your life, and they'll love you forever." The sympathetic letters and checks that pour in ever after from the dupes pay for Ida Mancini's hospital expenses. Underneath all of shenanigans is a steady stream of pop psychology seemingly culled from Woody Allen punchlines and especially insightful episodes of "Kung Fu." The notion of hypersexual Victor as the second coming of Christ is the literary equivalent of a spoiler on a Honda Civic a superficial gimmick that only accentuates a lack of real power.
The jarring blows of subversive irrever-ence
that made Fight Club great seem
more like formula in Choke. While
Palahniuk retains his knack for inventive
prose and cultural perception, his subject
matter needs a jolt to its complacency,
compliments of Tyler Durden. 
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