Choke: A Novel

Product Information

Having read all the series by woods I went back to read some of the earlier free standing books and have enjoyed reading them. Just my opinion though and I'm glad that others disagree because that makes discussing this far more interesting. He does a fairly good job of showing many of the anxieties of the lower-middle class and weaving a good story while he does it. Still, when you compare this to other feelings, to sadness, anger, fear, worry, despair, and depression, well, an addiction no longer looks so bad. And when I say his plot is secondary, I don't mean it in the way the plot was secondary (or nonexistant) in Ethan Frome.

It's clever, inventive, and has some interesting characters, with the only connection to his other work being that one character is from Woods' fictional town of Delano, Georgia, as are so many others of his characters. Like previous Palahniuk protagonists, Victor Mancini is young and prematurely cynical, a med school dropout whose eerily detached narration of the banal horrors of everyday existence gives way to a numbed account of nihilistic carnage.He spends most of the time taking care of Denny who constantly being caught with items that are not related to the colonial age period. Sian Beilock, a leading expert on the brain science behind human performance, is a professor in the psychology department at the University of Chicago.

Before the class, he has sex with fellow addict Nico in the church bathroom and this shows us his problem. Perhaps Palahniuk even intended that to be a possible interpretation of the character, and I'm just too dense to notice. 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. Denny is later fired from the museum, and begins collecting stones from around the city to build his "dream home". But if Salinger lurks in this voice so, too, does James Ellroy: the clipped paragraphs build a surface of moral decay.

From Tanya and her string of plastic balls to Gwen, who insists Victor wouldn't know how to rape a woman if he tried, Palahniuk presents us with incredibly memorable characters and scenes that will have you laughing long after you've closed the book.

CP doesn't strike me as a guy taking himself too seriously, or as someone who considers himself a master of the trade. Well to the first poster, I had never heard of this book before so after I read your posting I went to Audible and listened to the 11 minute sample. However, my current TBR pile means I probably won't seek out her work anytime soon, so unless fate intervenes, it'll probably be next year before I get around to it. And then they metastasized and followed the seminal vesicles up into the abdomen of each little boy, and by then," I say, "it was too late.Whether you love it or hate it, you are arguing the same side of the Palahniuk coin, and I think he would be delighted just to get any major reaction at all.