Choke

I've not read any Chuck Palahniuk before. In fact, I struggle to pronounce his surname. But I've seen Fight Club and I saw the trailer for Choke and when it fell into my lap, and I was failing to sleep, I thought "Ok, why not?". So perhaps I've come to this novel from completely the wrong angle, from the angle of a guy who doesn't really appreciate what Palahniuk's done before, and really just saw that there was choking and sex addiction in the film trailer and wanted to check it out.

There is choking. By that, I mean, Victor, our anti-hero, chokes himself in restaurants to make ordinary people into heroes, as he's discovered that just about anyone likes to be made to feel like a hero, and will, in addition, reward financially the person they've saved. He's doing this for a good reason though, and not because he's a low-down scumbag: his mother is dying of a degenerative brain disease at a local hospice, and just to keep her there costs $3,000 a month. That's the second strand, the mother-son relationship, as his visits start to become more and more strange, as more and more of the old women start to believe he is the one responsible for personal tragedies they each suffered many years before. And the third strand of the narrative? Sex addiction. Victor is a sex addict. He can't help himself. In fact, he goes to three different sex addiction self-help groups a week, just to get more sex.

Don't go kidding yourself, though. The sex is in no way beautiful or erotic or in any way enticing in this book; it's grimy, it's banal and worst of all, it's a bit horrible. There's something pukesome about the way Victor refers to his member as his 'dog', and the way in which he lists to himself the different things he can think about to prolong his orgasm: rotting meat; grandmothers; car crashes; suppurating pores. This isn't sex to be enjoyed, either for him or the reader, but to be put up with and struggled through until the eventual release. Perhaps Palahniuk is a genius, for rendering what should be scintillating as mundane and off-putting, uncomfortable and so starkly factual as to be terrifying.

There's a plot there too, as the three strands come to some kind of climax - can Victor kick the addiction, stay the course with his choking so as to save his mother? And just what is the secret behind his parentage that he so desperately seeks? A twist in the tale early on pushes the reader down a slightly different path, as we begin to re-evaluate his actions in a new light, but the eventual final twist left me a bit let-down. I suppose it might have been that I was reading too fast, on a flight to London, and didn't give the import of the finale the chance to hit home, but I couldn't help but feel that Palahniuk was chasing a similar shock-ending to Fight Club and had just missed it.

Still, it's eminently readable, and goes down a treat, if you can stomach some rather graphic, disgusting sexual discussion, and the fact that as Victor claims, he is a loser that you don't want to read about. His voice is certainly compelling, as he moves between the mundane, the graphic and his own personal obsession with medical terminology. The repeated phrases were at times impressive and amusing, but at other times grated a little too much. It felt too consciously crafted for my liking, and too obviously so. I think I need to read a little more Palahniuk before I pass further judgment.

***

2001

by Chuck Palahniuk