Book: Choke
Title: Choke
Author: Chuck Palahniuk
Genre: Black Comedy, Satire
Pages: 293
"Victor Mancini, a medical school drop out, is an antihero for our deranged times. Needing to pay elder care for his mother, Victor has devised an ingenious scam: he pretends to choke on pieces of food while dining in upscale restaurants. He then allows himself to be "saved" by fellow patrons who, feeling responsible for Victor's life, go on to send checks to support him. When he's not pulling this stunt, Victor cruises sexual addiction recovery workshops for action, visits his addled mom, and spends his days working at a colonial theme park." - Synopsis taken from Goodreads.com
I have mixed feelings on Palahniuk's writing style. While I enjoy a simple syntax, it's often almost too simple and there's a lot of repeating things in different ways. At the same time, I do appreciate the informal text with its conversational tone but more importantly appreciate how this tone lends itself to highlight the scattered bits of beautiful, insightful prose. With the simplicity comes concision.
As for the story, it boils down to the conflict of figuring out your role not only in society but in your own life, which everyone can relate to despite the absurd situations that lead our main character - a great anti-hero - to his own epiphany....
Spoilers follow:
My third Palahniuk book and I'd venture to say that he likes to have some underlying psychological issue with his main characters. Tyler Durden had multiple personalities, the Haunted crowd had Münchhausen and some twisted reverse Stockholm Syndrome, and now Victor has the very basic of psychoses; mommy issues.
Freud would have a field day with this mother/son relationship and resulting complexes. She's turned him into the new messiah, who boycotts the role while still performing skewered messianic feats. He plays the part of the asshole so that someone else can step up and become the hero or not bear the blame even when they should. Yet his intentional creation of heroes and making people feel better about themselves is, in itself, very heroic while simultaneously being selfish and showing his need for love in terms of how he understands it, which is to say abbreviated and sporadic.
But, DUDE! I totally fed into it! I was starting to think that maybe he was the next incarnation of Christ and that his mom wasn't as delusional as he thought and that Paige really did have a medical way of using a fetus to help fix Miss Mancini... but, no! She's just batshit crazy! Did not see that coming! I should have, however, figured Ida had originally kidnapped Victor as that was the impression I started to get pretty early on, especially with her constant re-kidnappings after he was taken away from her each time.
Nice and crazy. I really enjoyed this read.
Quotes:
- If you're going to read this, don't bother.
After a couple pages, you won't want to be here. So forget it. Go away. Get out while you're still in one piece.
Save yourself.
There has to be something better on television. Or since you have so much time on your hands, maybe you could take a night course. Become a doctor. You could make something out of yourself Treat yourself to a dinner out. Color your hair. You're not getting any younger.
What happens here is first going to piss you off. After that it just gets worse and worse. - People will jump through hoops if you make them feel like a god.
- I tell them, heap it on me. Make me play the big passive bottom in your guilt gang bang. I'll take everybody's load.
- After you find out all the things that can go wrong, your life becomes less about living and more about waiting.
- "We've taken the world apart but we have no idea what to do with the pieces..."
- We live and we die and anything else is just delusion. It's just passive chick bullshit about feelings and sensitivity. Just made-up subjective emotional crap. There is no soul. There is no God. There's just decisions and disease and death.
- And there's no escaping from constant escape. Distracting ourselves. Avoiding confrontation. Getting past the moment.
- "Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it."
- It's creepy, but here we are, the Pilgrims, the crackpots of our time, trying to establish our own alternate reality. To build a world out of rocks and chaos.
Words I Looked Up:
I'm not counting medical terms or rock types for this one, both of which were spewed like mad.
agrarianrelating to or concerning the land and its ownership, cultivation, and tenure
koana paradoxical anecdote or a riddle that has no solution; used in Zen Buddhism to show the inadequacy of logical reasoning
loggiaa covered gallery on the side of a building; an open balcony in a theater