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We can more or less deduce the following of the main protagonist in Choke; Victor Mancini is a ruthless con artist. Victor Mancini is a medical school dropout who's taken a job playing an Irish indentured servant in a colonial-era theme park in order to help care for his Alzehimer's-afflicted mother. Victor Mancini is a sex addict. Victor Mancini is a direct descendant of Jesus Christ. Welcome, once again, to the world of Chuck Palahniuk."Art never comes from happiness" says Mancini's mother only a few pages into the novel. Given her own dicey and melodramatic style of parenting, you would think that her son's life would be chock full of nothing but art. Alas, that's not the case--in the fine tradition of Oedipus, Stephen Dedalus and Anthony Soprano, Victor hasn't quite reconciled his issues with his mother. Instead, he's trawling sexual-addiction recovery meetings for dates and purposely choking in restaurants for a few moments of attention. Longing for a hug, in other words, he's settling for the Heimlich.
Thematically, this is pretty familiar Palanhiuk territory. It would be a pity to disclose the surprises of the plot but suffice to say that what we have here is a little bit of Tom Robbins's Another Roadside Attraction, a little bit of Don DeLillo's The Day Room and, well, a little bit of Fight Club. Just as with that book and the other two novels
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Chuck Palahniuk is, of course, best known for Fight Club, a remarkable novel which gave rise to an equally remarkable movie. As a writer, his specialty has been in having no speciality -- other than that of refusing to conform to any expectations readers might have of him. Except in one regard: a book by Palahniuk will be edgy, dark and iconoclastic. Which is very much the case with Rant, The Oral History of Buster Casey. This is a novel that leaves the reader notably off-kilter for a number of reasons; its coal-black vision of a society in a state of near savagery and its sardonically funny approach to the scabrous narrative. The ‘Oral History’ here relates to Buster ‘Rant’ Casey -- and the picture we receive of him is conveyed through a motley group of enemies, friends, relations and sexual partners. Through their wildly differing accounts, we build up a picture of a very unusual man indeed: a charismatic, sinister figure with a predilection for one recreational drug (the main component of which is rabies, no less). His other substance-of-choice (in terms of highly dangerous stimulants) is the venom of a black widow spider (for its aphrodisiac qualities). Living in a small town which is barely civilised (and the passages relating to this bizarre locale are conveyed in Palahniuk’s most phantasmagorical writing), Rant opts to strike out for the big town, and quickly establishes himself at the head honcho of an urban demolition derby which goes by the name of ‘Party Crashing’. The group, on selected nights, conducts a demented game of lethal dodgems, seeking out each other in cars to bring about satisfying motorway mayhem. And in the midst of this madness, Rant, a truly toxic figure, is spreading a variety of very nasty things among those he encounters.This is nothing less than a vision of society plunged into insanity, with every comforting conventional aspect ruthlessly torn away. It's futuristic, it's very dark, and it's very funny. And (as the foregoing might suggest) it is most definitely not for those who like their literature sedate and unshocking. And in that way, of course, it's a typical Chuck Palahniuk novel. --Barry Forshaw
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