This one's for you, Wa11z.

Back in 1999, I actually caught Fight Club in the theaters. I can understand why it wasn't a hit at the box office. On its surface, it had a nihilistic world-view, but by the end of the film, facing death hand-in-hand with his girlfriend, the narrator of the tale was giving us some kind of hope. Not necessarily hope that we would be free from credit card companies, but hope that we can carve out happiness and individuality for ourselves in a world where corporations are co-opting rebellion.

Choke the book followed Fight Club the movie two years later. If I remember, it was published before 9/11, so perhaps reading it now, six years later, I come to it differently than I might have on, say, September 10. The thing is, after having read Choke, I think it still speaks to us now just as much as it did before.

Choke follows the life of Victor Mancini, an ostensible sex-aholic who runs a scam to pay for his mother's treatment at a nursing home/mental hospital. By day, he works at a colonial village, recreating life in the 1700s. He and his co-workers spend their time getting high and feeding the visiting school kids the true story of life in colonial times, instead of the sanitized version that they're supposed to.

Victor's mom has Alzheimer's, and from the sound of it, she was a pretty radical chick in her day, dragging him from place to place, causing fun trouble along the way, whisking him off onto new adventures along the way. Victor's also a med-school dropout, so as we follow him along through his story, we learn little do-dads about what can happen to the body, like what happens if, say, plastic spheres block a certain opening in, say, the bowels.

Thematically, Palahniuk is on pretty much the same ground as he was in Fight Club, or it's incredibly familiar ground, but it followed Fight Club, so that's to be expected, right? And like Fight Club, it ends on a hopeful note with Victor and his friends. They - metaphorically at least - build a new world for themselves - so there is a departure here for Choke. Hope through construction rather than destruction.

However, it takes the story a while to get to the idea. If this were a movie, the seeds of the construction would have started much earlier. And it's something I'm wasn't too happy with here. Also, the plastic balls would have come into play much earlier, too. I think it would have been a stronger metaphor for the story. The resolution of said balls, though, is perhaps my favorite part of the story. It's horrifying, funny as fuck, and - for me, anyway - something of a slight physical relief. I suppose you could say that I physically empathised with Victor in that moment. Not literally, but... well, you'll get the point if you read it.

I blame this on the editors, mostly. I could rant for days about slack editors. They aren't doing their jobs anymore. And that's mostly due to the fact that the business has changed for book editors. They don't edit as much as they used to, instead spending most of their time pitching books to the sales teams, who then pitch them to chain stores. I heard that there's basically one person who controls the flow of fiction through either Barnes & Noble or Borders. And if she likes your book, then you're guaranteed a great place in the store.

Anyway, Palanhiuk did need an editor for Choke. It only needs a slight rejiggering, but I think it could have been a shining, perfect novel. As it stands, it's merely great.

I bought Choke from Murder Ink - or its sister store, anyway - up around West 92nd and Broadway in Manhattan. Murder Ink is out of business now, thanks to places like Barnes & Noble and Borders. I knew that my buying Choke and The Road wouldn't keep Murder Ink in business, but I wanted to show my support. I'd just found them, and it broke my heart to see them going under. So if you buy Choke - or any book for that matter - try to do it at a local mom-and-pop bookstore, or a local chain at least. Perhaps it's going to be inevitable that Barnes & Noble and Borders and their ilk are going to take over the retail book world, but I don't think we should go out without a fight.