Victor Mancini is a sex addict, scam artist, medical school dropout and all around scuzzball.

He’s slept with nearly every nurse at his mother’s extended care facility. Meanwhile, he tells his dying mother a ludicrous string of lies posing as a district attorney who defended her in one of her many brushes with the law.

He has three convicted prostitute “girlfriends” he hooks up with at Sexaholics Anonymous meetings three nights a week.

When he and his best friend Denny are not offering medical advice to strippers, they are dining in fancy restaurants where Victor makes himself choke on his food. The choking routine meant to have a fellow restaurant patron become his “savior,” who then feels as though they are now responsible for his life. Victor makes these connections nightly, building an impossibly long list of people he scams for money by writing them about his financial troubles.

In short, Victor is not the sort of main character readers fall in love with, and “Choke” is essentially the story of his sins.

The novel, released in 2001, is Chuck Palahniuk’s fourth, and it is the second of his 11 books to be made into a feature film.

Palahniuk’s first novel, “Fight Club,” set the bar high, but it also became a surefire template he has used in every book since.

He is known for three-page chapters, mentally off-balance characters, controversial themes and choppy sentences. Often, reading a Palahniuk book does not even feel like reading; it feels more like watching a movie.

“Choke” does not stray far from his now-familiar style, but it is Palahniuk at the very top of his game.

“Choke” is a novel for the media age. It is literature for people who do not have the attention span for reading.

This quality is both admirable and despicable.

On one hand, Palahniuk is helping to bring the novel into the 21st century by tailoring his writing style to fit the demands of the blogging age.

The informal style of writing is not without its drawbacks. Readers can easily lose themselves in the murky water that is the constant jumps in time and location. With his microchapters, Palahniuk shoots his load of perversion and sarcasm all over the silk bedspread that is the traditional novel style.

“Choke” is a rare, realistic view into the life of a sex addict. Victor works a job he hates as a colonial re-enactor to help pay the vast medical bills of his deranged mother. Ida was in and out of jails and mental hospitals for crimes ranging from stealing a school bus to feeding LSD to zoo animals. Victor, meanwhile, was in and out of foster homes, always knowing his mother would eventually show up to kidnap him.

A childhood spent stewing in self-loathing and abandonment issues has left Victor to use casual sex – and lots of it – to numb himself. When he meets his mother’s doctor, Paige Marshall, he finds himself to be actually attracted to her for the first time in his life. Her presence forces him to face his problems and addiction. Suddenly, it becomes easy to see why he was never really a bad guy.