"Bizarre" isn't the right word, but it's the first that comes to mind." Victor Mancini, the latest creation of Chuck Palahniuk (see also: Fight Club), never seems to have the right words to eloquently explain his upturned life. Perhaps his problem is that he looks to hard for the answers.
Victor Mancini is a sex addict, med school drop out, sometime savior, con-artist,loyal friend, deceitful enemy and the quintessential misogynistic momma's boy. By day he earns six bucks an hour working as a colonial stooge for a historical reenactment. His nights begin with anonymous sex in the bathroom adjoining his weekly sex addiction meeting, followed by a nightly near death experience in restaurants across town, where he pretends to choke only to be saved by some charitable schmuck. This army of saviors will later monetarily compensate him for allowing them to become a knight in shining armor; footing the three thousand a month to keep Vincent's mother in a managed care facility.
In this controversial new novel, Palahniuk ushers in a new wave of existentialism fueled by the everyday life of everyone we know. Our friends, neighboors, soccer coaches and paper boys pepper the novel, and with every move they make creating a new crisis in Victor's world.
There are no answers in Choke, only a series of open-ended questions. The fact that they are never resolved is what makes the work so brilliant.The reader walks away from the novel with the same uneasiness that Victor has endured his entire life.
The greatest thing about both Victor and the novel is their unwillingness to lend themselves to the instruction of others.
"If you're going to read this, don't bother," the first line of the novel commands. Victor, the reluctant savior goes through his days repeating the mantra, "What would Jesus not do?." Both, in their scathing attempts to introvert, inadvertantly become a lesson plan for those blinded by the ideals of the external world.
This is a novel of cause and effect, of creation and destruction. Palahniuk, carefully creates a duel reality, through a series of anonymous flashbacks that the reader assumes is Victor's upbringing. Each action has several reactions and it is up to the reader to explore the causal links in the prose to discover the impetus of Victor's actions.
Though Choke may be a little much to wade through, the obscenities, Victor's self-deprecation, and the pornographic language,, much like Fight Club, the ending comes with a twist that will leave the reader with bated breath, thumbing through the previous 43 chapters to find some small sign that they saw it coming.
