Choke by Chuck Palahniuk

Choke is definitely not an easy pill to swallow. Just the fact that its title commands you to quit your obnoxious breathing, is indicative of its attitude towards the human race, and that includes you dear reader. Of course as always it is sugarcoated by Palahniuk’s engaging, almost trance-inducing writing. Here it is at its needle point sharp best. He certainly seems to revel in his own sentence structures, to a point where every line seems to be but a part of a sequence formulation. Obsessive isn’t the right word, but it’s the first one that comes to mind. Even the rollicking catch phrases however, fail to lighten the mood of dark perversion, inevitable betrayal and general dejection in this novel. Whereas in most of Chuck’s novels one can at least see the light at the end of the tunnel of wretched human existence that he is so fond of exploring due to their fill of wry humor, here you just know that the light is most likely to be a train. As you follow Victor Mancini on his downward spiral through sexual addiction, choking in restaurants, messianic delusions and huge mommy issues one begins to lose sight of the surface. The affirmation is delivered in unconvincing terms, the hole Mancini spends the novel’s length digging for himself seems just too deep to suddenly climb out of. In the end the novel ends up stuck somewhere in your esophagus and you don’t know whether to cry, chuckle or spit it out all together. It is a familiar feeling with Palahniuk’s novels, except this one is just so aptly named. Perhaps he will continue to release his bile filled vendettas until we really do choke, as I suspect was his intention all along.

On Beauty by Zadie Smith

One cannot expect too much excitement from a novel about college politics, middle aged marriages and white towns in New England. It’s just not there. The term middle of the road should have a picture of this book’s cover next to it in the dictionary. Not even Smith’s inventive, sometimes forcefully inventive writing, can save the subjects from their own banality. This is no White Teeth that carried its reader afloat upon its many entangled storylines to reach a final whirlpool where all the threads came together for the ultimate splash. To say that On Beauty is more subtle than this would be implying that that’s a good thing. Again Smith relies on the multiple storyline technique, giving each character his or her own voice as the narrators change from chapter to chapter. However the voices just don’t resound as much as they used to. Kiki Belsey, a character with a lot of investment from Smith, does not justify the effort. Jerome Belsey is a thin ghost of what was potentially a great opportunity for exploration – a born again Christian in an ultra liberal multi racial family. The two characters that truly inspire genuine fondness are Zora and Howard, even though they may be the least sympathetic. Howard is a self absorbed, white, English, art history professor, who truly does not consider anyone but himself in his pursuit of the aesthetic and his humanity shines through the dreariness of the text at the most unexpected moments. Zora too is an awkward goal oriented young girl, who will trample anyone on her way to whatever meaningless goal she set up for herself in order to avoid affection, which is oddly sweet. It’s quite easy to identify with the flawed in the novel, it’s the embodiments of human nobility that are a little hard to swallow. The plotlines too are a bit of a mess, none of the meticulous calculation that was so astounding in White Teeth. The so called Belsey – Kipps family feud, never comes to any fruition and never even has a profound effect on the main storylines. The book drags on till page 300 where it begins a head dashing race to the finish. Sure, those last pages are very exciting and have tons of really pornographic depictions of sex, but are they worth the uphill climb of the first 300? Umm…yes.