One thing is certain: the influence of religion on his work is distinctly Christian. I ask Chuck how he feels about Christianity in particular, if he feels that Christianity gets an unfair top billing out of all the religions, and everything else just kind of plays second fiddle. He stops to think.
         "Well, I don't know. I haven't thought about these things, so I don't want to talk about them just right off the top of my head." He drinks his coffee, ponders this question some more. "I think Christianity has some real inherent faults in some of the metaphors that it uses, and those are the things that I like to play with. If we try to identify God using metaphors from our culture, like fathers and lambs, then what happens to our connection with God? Most human beings never come across a lamb. A lamb is a totally abstract thing to me. I saw a lamb once at a petting zoo. So 'Lamb of God'... Okay, that's what a lamb looks like. In our culture where fathers are sort of absent, and where father are no longer a huge item of respect, or discipline, or whatever – if we've already been using that metaphor to describe God, and then the real thing in society, the father, breaks down, what happens to our idea of God? This shortcutting to comprehend God by using our world breaks down our idea of God when our world breaks down. That's what I don't like. That's what I'm always attacking in my books. In Fight Club I talked about that a lot."
         Despite the profound subject matter, however, Choke is actually his most humorous novel yet. Perhaps that's why it works so well to get its message across. In one scene, Victor participates in a rehearsed, simulated rape that produces absolutely hilarious results.
         "Oh, man," he laughs. "The day I brought that into workshop, I expected to get crucified on that. And people laughed their eyes out. People were laughing so hard, that I thought, 'Well, maybe I'm just being too sensitive about it.' Then I sent it out into the world and I thought, 'I'm still going to get crucified on this.' But no, what I was hearing back from editors and readers, men and women – especially women at the movie studios that I knew – said that that was the scene that they laughed at the most. Then I thought, 'Well maybe it works, and it's not quite so threatening.' But I did fully expect to get people objecting to that."
         At this point, a waiter approaches our table and asks Chuck, "May I recommend the clam chowder today, sir?"
         Chuck puts his hand to his forehead and groans. "Oh no, not on a Sunday. Should I not be eating this?" The waiter laughs nervously at his joke, then leaves. Word gets around and everyone's acting out scenes from Fight Club.
         Several minutes later, a waitress approaches and tells Chuck that Ryan (the waiter) really wanted to ask for his autograph but he was too embarrassed – so he's taking his fork instead. Chuck gasps. "My fork? For DNA testing? Have we come to Gattaca already?" After laughing about this, Chuck tells her to bring over a piece of paper and he'll autograph it. Which he does happily.
         Getting back to the interview, Chuck addresses the issue of sexual addiction in Choke. "From what I understand about sexaholics, and the whole pathology of it, is that they use sex as an anesthetic," he says. "In the groups that I attended, it wouldn't be each person was constantly like some sort of gourmand out there trying to discover as many different sexual things as possible. Each of them seemed to have latched onto one thing. There were these guys who whacked off 18 times a day, and there were these guys who went to lingerie modeling parlors 5 times a day, and guys who went to prostitutes 8 times a week. And, no pun intended, they were in a rut. Cute pun though. They used it as an anesthetic. They didn't want something new and different every time. They found the thing that worked for them, so they just went and did that thing. It wasn't so much an exploration as they just wanted the same old same old. A heroin addict is very happy with heroin. He doesn't screw around once he finds heroin."