Since his debut novel, Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk's fast-paced black comedies about shell-shocked, factoid-slinging, nihilistic losers have drifted further from any kind of recognizable landscape. Where Fight Club centered on a disaffected everyman office worker, its successors, Survivor and Invisible Monsters, respectively starred a disaffected death-cult survivor turned celebrity messiah and a disaffected, horribly disfigured ex-supermodel turned traveling con artist. Palahniuk's fourth book, Choke, takes gritty surreality a few long leaps further with protagonist Victor Mancini. A disaffected sex-addict and med-school dropout who works part-time imitating an indentured servant at a colonial-themed tourist trap, Mancini makes most of his money by faking choking fits in restaurants, then befriending and sponging off the would-be heroes who administer the Heimlich maneuver. Like Fight Club's alienated narrator, Mancini desperately needs the catharsis of weeping on the shoulders of strangers who think they're helping him. He also needs their money to support his institutionalized mother, a crackpot rebel who, like Fight Club's social terrorist Tyler Durden, devoted her life to cracking ordinary people's complacency through colorful, anarchistic stunts. But where Palahniuk's first book achieved subversive brilliance by assaulting authentic pretense and apathy with hard-edged realism, Choke hides its similar messages behind increasingly cartoonish characters and situations. As always, Palahniuk attacks society's veils through the conceit of manufactured identity, as Victor maniacally recreates himself, subverting his own barely extant personality to meet the needs of his mother, his authenticity-obsessed theme-park employers, his proud restaurant "saviors," and his many sex partners. (In one embarrassing scene, he attempts to live up to the fetish-fantasies of a woman who wants to be raped, and who provides huffy, meticulous choreography both before and during the event.) As always, Palahniuk delivers self-aware, machine-gun prose that pointedly addresses and overturns reader expectations while pounding through motif-laden, one-sentence paragraphs, thematic sound bites, and repetitious fragments that owe a great deal to Kurt Vonnegut. And, as always, the result is surprising, jarring, funny, and uniquely energetic satire. But this particular brand has started to sloppily recreate the world instead of cleverly deriding it.