Choke is a rated-R half-satire, half-adventure story about Victor Mancini, a sex addict who attends 12-step recovery programs looking for an easy fix. He makes a living as an actor who appeals to heroes: He pretends to choke on his dinner in upscale restaurants and allows a Good Samaritan to save him. The hero follows up by sending Victor money for birthdays and holidays, because he or she feels responsible for Victor's life. (Don't try this at home, kids. It's dangerous and not very likely to work.)
The book opens with a warning:
If you're going to read this, don't bother.
After a couple pages, you won't want to be here. So forget it. Go away. Get out while you're still in one piece.
Save yourself.
Which, of course, you will ignore. I did.
Within the first few short chapters, you learn that Victor's mother, now in a home and suffering from Alzheimer's, has a colorful criminal-and non-criminal-history. In her better days, she dispensed trivia like PEZ: "If you're ever in the Hard Rock Café ... and they announce 'Elvis has left the building,' that means all the servers need to go to the kitchen and find out what dinner special just sold out."
You find that Victor works at a 1734 Colonial American theme park as an Irish indentured servant who tells visiting kids that George Washington was a woman and the truth about the rhyme "Ring Around the Rosie."
Victor freely offers medical diagnoses, because he took the MCAT and went to the USC School of Medicine.
"See how her fingernails look," I tell Denny, "that's a sure sign of lung cancer."
If you're confused, that means renal shutdown, severe kidney failure.
You learn all this during Physical Examination, your second year in medical school. You learn all this, and there's no going back.
Ignorance was bliss.
Now don't misunderstand-Victor is pretty much an optimist. Maybe an optimist with a dash of realism. I'm not sure.
This book is brilliant, a little disturbing, a lot graphic, and touches that uneasiness you feel when you're discussing a topic you shouldn't in public. Palahniuk makes full use of urban legends about sex, and flips without warning from a first-person Victor as a 30-something loser to a third-person Victor as a child. But just go with it, let the story carry you, and don't feel guilty. You didn't write it.
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