Choke by Chuck Palahniuk

(pb; 2001)

From the back cover

"Victor Mancini's a medical school dropout with a problem. He needs to pay for elder care for his mother, who's got Alzheimer's. So he comes up with the perfect scam: pretending to choke in upscale restaurants and getting 'saved' by fellow diners, who, feeling responsible for Victor's life, offer him financial support.

"Meanwhile, he cruises sexual addiction recovery workshops and spends his days working at Colonial Dunsboro, where his stoner colleagues are sentenced to the stocks for any deviation from the colonial lifestyle. Oh, yeah, and he's desperate to find the truth of his paternity, which his addled mother suggests may be divine."


Review

This is one of Palahniuk's finer novels, joining the ranks of Fight Club, Lullaby, Rant and Snuff.

The jigsaw-puzzle, factoid-laden structure is everpresent in any Palahniuk work, but the happenings of Choke, shown through the first-person POV of Victor Mancini, are less jigsaw-y and factoid-oriented. Rather, the focus is on Victor's dysfunctional, falling-apart life and his strange, crazy pseudo-family -- there's Denny, Victor's slovenly, rock-collecting, sex-addict best friend; there's Ida Mancini, Victor's Alzheimer's-afflicted, crazy jailbird mother, who doesn't even recognize him anymore; there's Dr. Paige Marshall, Ida Mancini's doctor, who says she can help Ida get better, if only Victor will have sex with her (the doctor, not his mother); and there's Cherry Daiquiri (aka, Beth), a stripper, Denny's girlfriend-of-sorts.

All of these characters figure prominently into Victor trying to push through the fourth step of his twelve-step Sexaholic Recovery program (listing and righting all of own's past sins, if possible), and his increasingly desperate attempts to pay for his mother's nursing-home care.

Thematically, this shares recognizable elements with Fight Club, and most of other Palahniuk's works. There's a mention of masturbating near a pool intake valve (which brings to mind the pool masturbation scene of Saint Gut-Free in Haunted).

The main thing that sets Choke apart from most other Palahniuk novels (aside from Diary and Snuff) is how warm (emotionally-speaking) and relatable Victor Mancini is. Less nihlistic than Tyler Durden (Ida Mancini ably fills that Palahniuk-recurrent role) and other like-minded Palahniukian characters, he's just a normal person -- like most of us -- trying to muddle his way through life as smartly as possible, with a minimum of fuss.

Great, fast read. Check it out.

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The film version is set for a September 26, 2008 theatrical release. Sam Rockwell plays Victor Mancini. Anjelica Huston plays Ida Mancini. Kelly Macdonald plays Paige Marshall. Brad William Henke plays Denny. Bijou Phillips plays Ursula. Jonah Bobo plays "Young Victor" (Victor as a boy).

Clark Gregg (who also directed and wrote the screenplay for the film) plays Lord High Charlie.

No Country For Old Men by Cormac McCarthy

(hb; 2005)

From the inside flap:

"Llewelyn Moss, hunting antelope near the Rio Grande, instead finds men shot dead, a load of heroin, and more than $2 million in cash. Packing the money out, he knows, will change everything. But only after two more men are murdered does a victim's burning car lead Sheriff Bell to the carnage out in the desert, and he soon realizes how desperately Moss and his young wife need protection. One party in the failed transaction hires an ex-Special Forces officer to defend his interests against a mesmerizing freelancer, while on either side are men accustomed to spectacular violence and mayhem. The pursuit stretches up and down and across the border, each participant seemingly determined to answer what one asks another: how does a man decide in what order to abandon his life?"


Review:

McCarthy's trademark apostrophe- and quotation mark-free prose makes this hyperviolent tale even more compelling, as Anton Chigurh, an escaped sociopathic killer, and Sheriff Bell, a laid-back no-nonsense cop, separately pursue Llewelyn Moss, who means to confront Chigurh on his terms, not Chigurh's.

But Chigurh and Bell aren't the only people interested in Moss. There's Carson Wells, a middle-aged ex-military hitter and ex-associate of Chigurh's, who's been hired by his unnamed employer to retrieve, by any means possible, the $2.4 million that Moss loped off with.

This bloodier-than-a-catamenial-clusterf**k work is often exceptional, with some great third-act plot twists and virtuosic omissions (leaving much to the reader's imagination), and characters (women included) who come off tougher and larger than life.

One of the things that mars this otherwise engrossing tale are the superfluous chapters where Bell reminisces about how times and people (particularly criminals) have changed since he first became a lawman, many years back. These first-person interludes feel completely out of place here: they're unnecessary speed-bumps in this pedal-to-the-metal read.

The other flaw is the disappointing finish, which peters out in semi-rambly fashion. It fits the themes running though No Country (Regret, Death, Change, Aging), but like those shoe-horned first-person ruminations, it doesn't fit in with the quirky ferocity of the rest of the novel.

Good book, worth your time -- not one of McCarthy's best, by most accounts I've read.

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The resulting film is set for limited theatrical release on November 9, 2007. Joel Coen and Ethan Coen scripted and directed the film. Tommy Lee Jones plays Ed Tom Bell. Javier Bardem plays Chigurh. Josh Brolin plays Llewelyn Moss. Woody Harrelson plays Carson Wells. Kelly Macdonald plays Carla Jean Moss. Tess Harper plays Loretta Bell.