CHOKE HOLD, 2000
As Bruce Lee once said, "To know oneself is to study oneself in action with another person."
After suffering a trauma that would eventually shape his outlook on life, Jeremy Little finishes high school and leaves for Boston to study drama. He drops out in his first year and becomes obsessed with martial arts training. Eventually he owns his own school, finds a girlfriend, and things seem to be looking up until one of his students kills a gay man. The resulting publicity destroys Jeremy's business and he returns home to the small Alberta town of Seymour where he is forced to confront his father and everything else he ran away from. Jeremy struggles with his fear as he learns to open himself up to his family and the possibilities of love.
Choke Hold is a fast-paced, funny and odd novel that follows the life of a young man who feels torn between the need to defend himself and the desire to stop fighting.
Praise for Choke Hold
"This is a book for anyone who ever felt like leaving any town forever
. . . It is a warning to look deep within yourself first. Best of all, though,
it's a damn good read with enough strife, sauciness and the purest plutonium
style to justify a second read immediately after you've run through it. . .
.Partway full of Hamlet angst, the rest is a weird cross between bar gossip,
Alberta ball cap sensibility and underground comics that you're probably too
scared to read. . . But it fits, brother. The narrative structure is no more
jarring than being hit with your own memories. . . long-forgotten shocks weirder
than those in the freakiest Haruki Murakami novels."
-The Edmonton Sun
"A convincing glimpse into a specific culture of violence, a world of
young men both deeply drawn to each other and divided by cycles of fear, rivalry
and simmering rage. . . .This debut presents a familiar pattern of male dysfunction
with grace and insight."
-The Globe and Mail
"The author sketches the tale with the sparest prose, preferring to cut
to the quick rather than beguile readers with a lavish style. This approach
works well, as Babiak's writing soon begins to resemble a fighting mind set
- words, like blows, are quick, decisive, born of gut instinct."
-Eye Weekly
"One of the joys of this novel is that it shrugs off genre constraints
through sheer force of language, through an accumulation of detail that captures
small town life in all its stupefying banality and hidden, shameful richness
. . . The martial arts scenes are so voluptuously rendered that you sense the
eros hidden at their heart, and you understand that fighting is a kind of communication."
-Quill & Quire
"Breezy, honest, and entertaining as hell. . . . Babiak is definitely
a writer to be reckoned with. . . . He doesn't animate his
characters - you can't see any strings; they live and breathe
on their own. . . . A tremendous first novel."
-See Magazine
"I loved this little book. . . . Babiak has given us an Alberta novel
that is, in large part, about jean jackets and the people who wear them. They
aren't profound, just profoundly interesting."
-Ottawa Citizen