Choke: A Novel

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It's been a long time since I read Choke and I don't remember much other than that I didn't really like it. In no time, she and Chuck are between the sheets, but when husband Harry drowns in a highly suspicious diving accident, she makes sure it is Chuck who is the immediate suspect. CP attempts to pass this off with some platitude of how most immigrants seem more American than those born into it. In the present-day setting of the book, Victor has left medical school to support his feeble mother, who is now in a nursing home.

To pay for a nursing home, he becomes a con artist by going to different expensive restaurants and causes himself to choke in the middle of his meal to trap a "good Samaritan" into saving his life. 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. In a strip club, Victor finds himself identifying carcinogenic moles on a dancer's inner thighs; wandering the corridors of his mother's hospital, he is wrongly identified by the crazed and deluded as the source of their neuroses, and he grimly takes on all the more repellent sins of the world to aid their therapy. It might be because they are both cynical characters also, in both novels there are transgressive approaches to sex.

CHUCK PALAHNIUK is the author of fourteen novels— Beautiful You, Doomed, Damned, Tell-All, Pygmy, Snuff, Rant, Haunted, Diary, Lullaby, Choke, Invisible Monsters, Survivor, and Fight Club—which have sold more than five million copies altogether in the United States. I have to agree with you about the parable aspect; one of my problems is that the message doesn't tend to be all that earth shattering.

He is also the author of Fugitives and Refugees, a nonfiction profile of Portland, Oregon, and the nonfiction collection Stranger Than Fiction. Reveal too little, and a coherent review is almost impossible, leaving the reader with a false impression of complexities and tangles which are insurmountable. Chuck Chandler has choked on more than one occasion--first as a pro tennis player at Wimbledon, then as a womanizing coach at posh tennis clubs around the country.

Having read all the series by woods I went back to read some of the earlier free standing books and have enjoyed reading them. This and his constant moves from one home to another have left Victor unable to form lasting and stable relationships with women. If you've seen Fight Club the movie, you know how compelling those little tidbits sound when spoken out loud.