Confessions Of A Dangerous Mind

Choke
By Chuck Palahniuk
Random House UK, 293 pages
Available at Powerbooks

As a writer, Chuck Palahniuk can’t help being provocative. Sometimes the provocations strike a major chord, such as his first novel, Fight Club. Other times they’re just in-your-face for the sake of being there.

Choke, Palahniuk’s fourth novel, is like that. The ideas are all over the place, scattered like a shotgun blast, but it’s refreshing just to read a novelist who still has ideas. Dangerous ideas.

Choke follows the slacker adventures of Victor Mancini, a med-school dropout and sexaholic who works at one of those American colonial theme parks. You may have heard of them: All the employees dress up like colonial villagers, all the food is grown and processed naturally, every barn and fence is rendered in precise colonial detail. Outside, of course, souvenir shops sell expensive, modern-day trinkets to tourists.

Like many slackers, Victor, his friend Denny and the other employees have somehow escaped the demands of modern life by submerging themselves into someone else’s past: in this case, a Disney reality that’s only as real as the fence enclosing the theme park. (For others, it may be escape into ‘70s nostalgia, or ‘80s nostalgia, or ‘60s nostalgia… It seems there’s no escaping our inherited past.)

The only trouble is, Victor and Denny can’t seem to stay in character.

The colonial governor keeps staring at Denny and me for signs of us being historically inaccurate so he can lobby the town council to banish us to the wilderness, just boot us out the town gate and let the savages shoot arrows and massacre our unemployed butts.

"Tuesday," Denny tells me, "His Highness saw I had Chap Stick on my lips." Denny sniffs. "This morning, before lunch, Goodwife Landson caught me smoking a cigarette behind the meetinghouse."

This is just, for sure, another shitty day in the eighteenth century.

You wear an earring, you go to jail. Color your hair. Pierce your nose. Put on deodorant. Go directly to jail. Do not pass go. Do not collect jack shit.

The Lord High Governor bends Denny over in the stocks at least twice a week, for chewing tobacco, for wearing cologne, for shaving his head.

Nobody in the 1730s had a goatee, His Governess will lecture.

And Denny will sass him back, "Maybe the real cool colonists did."

And it’s back to the stocks for Denny.

It develops that playing a colonist is just half of Victor’s income. The rest of the time, he eats out in restaurants. Night after night, he orders the largest steak available and forces enough down his windpipe to induce choking. Then he waits patiently for a fellow diner to come to his rescue.

"Somebody saves your life, they’ll love you forever" is Victor’s reasoning. Love comes in the form of birthday cards, checks and money sent by concerned restaurant patrons who have Heimliched Victor over the years.

But wait. The shaggy-dog story continues.

Victor uses this largesse to keep his mother under medical care at a hospital. She’s withering away, a victim of Alzheimer’s. Victor’s trying to find out from her how he came to inherit such a strange, purposeless life, but his mother’s memory is rapidly disintegrating. Meanwhile, he’s trying to resist the sexual come-ons of a Dr. Paige Marshall, who insists that impregnating her will provide the fetal tissue necessary to do experimental grafts to cure his mother’s Alzheimer’s.

Yes, on paper, it does sound as if Mr. Palahniuk is pulling the story thread-by-thread from his ass.

But, as usual, realism is not what people expect from Chuck Palahniuk’s books. These are usually idea novels, manifestos of anarchy and pranksterism. Just as Fight Club taught the average reader about manufacturing explosives from soap, Choke gives us gritty details about cervical biopsies, birth defects, the true meaning of "Ring Around The Rosie"(a children’s sing-along that began during The Bubonic Plague), and how to have sex in passenger plane toilets.

This last section is quite detailed, specifying plane models and bathroom sizes, and makes you wonder how Palahniuk does his research. I would guess, being from Oregon, that he is surrounded by friends and acquaintances with a wealth of off-the-map information, anecdotes and urban myths. The kind of people who believe in large government conspiracies. Perhaps he surfs the Internet for details, like most people I know.

Or maybe he just has a sick and twisted imagination.

Choke is certainly no masterpiece. It’s a choppy, episodic satire of modern slackerhood, with a premise so preposterous it wouldn’t even make a Rob Schneider movie. Many of the ideas in Choke come off as half-baked (the ethical argument about fetal tissue research, for instance, goes nowhere). And it features Palahniuk’s usual rap about a generation of men raised by single moms: that they’re more violent, messed-up and pissed-off; more hopeless than any other generation. This, however, could just be the author’s own mea culpa.

But like an older lion of American novels, Don DeLillo, Palahniuk is seemingly more interested in how the phenomena of American life affects us: How we are so manipulated by media that we actually become part of the medium itself. How our desires become habits, and our habits become sickly-fascinating vices. It’s not a pretty or pleasant world that Palahniuk depicts, but if you keep telling yourself: it’s only a satire, it’s only a satire, it’s only a satire… you might find some interesting, possibly even dangerous, notions to chew on in Choke.