Monday, December 29, 2014

What Would Jesus NOT Do?

Choke
by Chuck Palahniuk
p. 2001




Choke is the second novel I’ve had the pleasure to read by Chuck Palahniuk, author of Fight Club, so I sort of knew what I was getting myself into going in. Palahniuk’s quintessential pièce de résistance might have been enough to give the me a starting impression, but now I’m convinced the author has a type: stories about damaged losers who find themselves entrenched in incomprehensible situations of their own design. Like Fight Club, it’s a non-linear first person narrative, but this narrator has a name—Victor Mancini—and his problems are a little more of this world, specifically, of the flesh. Victor Mancini is a sex addict. When he’s not attending sex addiction meetings, he’s usually at work, unenthusiastically reenacting medieval times amongst his coworkers and friends, mostly burnouts and addicts themselves, or he’s having sex with various women (and for such a short, terse narrative, Palahniuk sure doesn’t spare the reader all the lurid details).

But Victor has another addiction, and it’s this one that really sets him up to fail. Victor’s mother—his only familial connection in his 20-odd years on this planet—is wasting away in an asylum that Victor cannot afford on his own, so to make ends meet, Victor has become a con artist. His art? Choking on food in restaurants every night to force complete strangers to save his life. I’ll admit, I had a hard time believing that this sordid hobby would actually yield monetary reward, but according to Victor, having people save his life creates a lifetime bond between the savior and himself as well as giving the stranger a sort of hero complex that makes him or her feel responsible for Victor. He then uses that bond to write to the would-be heroes, and make himself out to be so pathetic that they feel compelled to give him money. I still have a hard time buying this plot point, but I guess I’ll never really know if it will work. In any case, suspension of disbelief is something I came armed with going into a Palahniuk novel.

Our author—and by extension, Victor Mancini himself—wants us to believe that Victor is a terrible person. It is, in fact, the first thing we are told at the beginning of the book, right after being told we’re wasting our time reading it. There is certainly a lot of evidence to support that, and Victor goes to great lengths to convince us and himself of its truth, and yet I just couldn’t buy it. Maybe it’s the natural need to find something sincere or relatable about main characters—a coping mechanism to get through a piece of fiction, a response conditioned into us for the history of the written word until postmodernism came along. Maybe it’s a gut reaction to not believe anything Chuck Palahniuk says. Or maybe Victor Mancini really isn’t such a bad guy after all.

I suppose whether or not you like Victor really just depends on what type of person you are. I could easily see people despising him for all the right reasons. Hell, if I met Victor Mancini in real life, I’d probably not get along with him either, but in character form, I find him more sympathetic. It’s his complicated relationship with his mother that got me. No matter how many times Palahniuk describes the adolescent Victor as a “stupid little ratfink crybaby twerp” or a dickwad or a sucker, my heart went out to him every time he went back to his disturbed mother and took himself away from a healthy life. The kid never stood a chance, and his method of coping as an adult—theatrically risking his life in public to get some any kind of a loving reaction towards him from strangers—is so pathetic and masochistic that I still feel for him, even though I know he’s an adult now and should technically know better. Perhaps I’m just a sucker, another sap that Victor would easily manipulate if he got me in the place he wanted me, but I do find Victor sympathetic. It doesn’t help that the book proceeds to draw some crafty, if far-fetched parallels between him and Jesus Christ himself. That sort of manipulation is less Victor Manicini; but it is all Chuck Palahniuk.

Though Choke follows similar storytelling patterns as Fight Club—a narrator who is a little disturbed, who finds himself launched into bizarre hostile circumstances far out of his control, who tells it like it is, even if it’s not very politically correct—the book, on the whole, ends a much more positive note. I’d be interested to check out more Palahniuk novels next year, to see if my theories about his philosophy are true, or if I just happened to pick two very similarly-styled books.

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