CHOKE
By Chuck Palahniuk

In his 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman describes how the typographical age, or Age of Exposition, has been replaced by the Age of Show Business. The dominant medium of our time is television, which speaks in images rather than words. The information and art this image-based culture produces is incoherent, contradictory, and non-rational. Its ideology is entertainment. Aside from providing amusement, it is without content, meaning or purpose.

Which brings us to Choke.

Choke is the story of a young man named Victor Mancini, a med school dropout who works at the historical theme park of Colonial Dunsboro. Since pretending to be a peasant for the tourists doesn’t come close to paying the bills for his mother’s nursing home, he supplements his meager income with a truly ridiculous bit of fraud.

The scam works this way: Victor goes to a restaurant and pretends to choke. Inevitably someone rescues him and for the rest of their life they feel responsible for Victor, to the extent of sending him regular cheques in the mail.

There’s a lot more to the story than this, but the different elements remain mostly disconnected. Victor’s torrid and kinky sex life is the product of his attending a recovery group for sex addicts. His mother’s Italian diary suggests that he was conceived the son of Christ through the use of a religious relic. His mother’s nurse wants to get pregnant with Victor’s baby so she can use tissue from the fetus to save his mother from Alzheimer’s (or so she says). His best friend Denny collects rocks until he has enough to build a castle on a vacant lot.

And so it goes.

The best thing about this kind of writing is that none of it has to make sense. Entertainment is all about stimulation. Its goal is to provide pleasure without any of the intellectual and moral challenge of art. In its most basic form, stimulation is sex and violence. Fight Club, Palahniuk’s first novel, was mostly concerned with violence. Choke is obsessed with sex.

Victor’s path to sainthood is the negative way described by T. S. Eliot when he said the way down is the way up. He achieves a sort of grace by debasing himself, having come to the realization that torture isn’t torture and humiliation isn’t humiliation unless you choose to suffer. In themselves, degradation and humiliation can be quite liberating. Victor first becomes aware of this when he sees pictures on the Internet of a man dressed as Tarzan having sex with an orangutan. One look at the Tarzan man’s beatific smile and Victor recognizes him as a savior.

There are a few things one could say about this scene, but what struck me the most is the anachronism. At the beginning of the novel, Victor is in his mid-20s. But he is described as first seeing the picture of the Tarzan-man while surfing the Internet as a kid. If we imagine the main events in the novel to be taking place in the present, how is this possible?

This may seem like a small point, but in fact it is quite important. What Palahniuk is doing is writing just the kind of book Postman predicted. Anachronism has no meaning in a world without any sense of history. Alzheimer’s disease and historical theme parks are only metaphors for a book that has no memory.

And without memory, there is scarcely any need for narrative consistency. At the beginning of one chapter Victor is distraught over the number of restaurants he has crossed out with his red felt pen because he can’t do his choke routine in the same place twice. Yet only four pages later the possibilities are infinite: all he has to do is close his eyes and stab his finger at an open phone book. At another point he enters his mother’s nursing home and remarks how clean it smells: "you only smell chemicals, cleaning stuff, or perfumes." Yet later, when he brings flowers for his mom her room "has that smell, the same smell as Denny’s tennis shoes in September after he’s worn them all summer without socks."

Choke may well be the best example yet of a Show Business Age novel: amusing, anti-realistic, inconsistent, incoherent, and contradictory. Without any sense of cause-and-effect the construction of a plot is nearly impossible. We just see wild and crazy things happening to weird people. There are plenty of interesting ideas in Choke, especially with regard to Victor’s imitation of Christ and Denny’s attitude toward art, but they are only epigrams left to float like gratuitous pieces of fruit in the shiny jelly of Palahniuk’s hurried prose.

Sweet jelly, but it isn’t filling stuff.

Notes:
Review first published July 21, 2001.

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