Nope, I didn’t like that at all. 

I think Chuck Palahniuk is a very clever, innovative writer.  It’s why I’ve decided to do a talk on him at the Nova Mob (an SF book club held in Melbourne).  I’ve loved Fight Club, Invisible Monsters and Survivor, and I was really looking forward to Choke. 

And then I read the first line of the book.

 

“If you’re going to read this don’t bother.” 

I smiled and thought, yep, here we go again, only Chuck could tell me how crap his book is going to be and the delight me with his literary genius.

But after 50 pages of Choke I began to realise there was more truth in those words then I was willing to admit. 

Choke is a mess.  There’s no other way to describe it.  It’s Chuck P’s version of His Greatest Hits, but without actually being a great book.  We have self help groups (previously seen in Fight Club) we have religion (previously seen in Survivor) we have issues with parents and upbringing (previously seen in Invisible Monsters), and we have rocks (alright, not previously seen anywhere).

Basically, what we have with Choke is the story of Victor Mancini, a guy trying to find meaning in his life.  His mother is sick and he pays for her healthcare by pretending to choke on food then making the person who “saves” him feel responsible for his life.  In the end, those people find themselves duty bound to help Victor with his problems.  So they give him money when he asks for it, money he uses to pay his mother’s hospital bills.

Victor is also has a major sex addiction and in great Palahniuk style, the sex in this novel is described in the most graphic lurid and comedic way possible. 

There’s more to this novel then just sex and health care, but to be honest I lost interest about halfway through.  Yeah, there’s a couple of nice revelations towards the end of the novel, but nothing that makes up for the disjointed narrative that precedes it. 

And that’s really the problem with Choke, there’s no rhythm to the novel.  Each of the small chapters focuses on another aspect of Victor’s life, whether it be his early childhood, where his mother would kidnap him and force him to do weird social experiments, or his sexual habits (which are quite funny) or a look into the life of his bizarre mate Denny who has a thing for rocks. 

Just as the book gets interesting, the focus changes again and the momentum is lost.

The other problem is that I didn’t care about Victor.  I agree that Chuck’s books aren’t really about the characters, and yet I’ve always found them to be people – as weird as they are – whose stories I want to know about.  But like Victor says at the beginning of the novel, he is a stupid little boy.  Because of his strange upbringing he’s a guy with no focus, with no sense of self, with no personality to call his own.  Of course, that’s partly the point of the novel, it’s a book about people finding purpose, whether it’s through saving someone whose choking, weird sex or collecting rocks.  Victor is desperate to find some purpose and he believes that by keeping his Mother alive, and by hearing her secret, everything might click together.  And yet, when he is told a sort of truth, he pushes away from it and looks somewhere else.  Unfortunately, when your main character has nothing to define him, as a reader you feel no compelling urge to continue reading. 

I wanted Choke to be some much better.  I wanted it to be as good as three previous Palahniuk books.  But this just felt like Chuck re-treading the same old ground, without any of the biting satire found in books like Fight Club and Invisible Monsters.

Oh well, I get the feeling that Choke is a bit of a marmite novel (I’m sounding like a Brit now, aren’t I?).  You love it or you hate it.  For me, it’s too experimental, it’s too disjointed and it’s populated by characters that I basically couldn’t give a stuff about.

So no, I didn’t like Choke at all.