If these details strike you as the perfect setup for high hilarity, then you've just the right sense of humor to appreciate Jim Knipfel's Slackjaw , a very funny book that begins with a suicide attempt, ends in near total blindness, and throws in a failed marriage, an aborted Ph.D., a nearly fatal concussion, a few more suicide attempts, and a wholly talent-free punk band called the Pain Amplifiers in between. It could be the book's epigraph. Slackjaw is a joyous elegy to being chronically existentially pissed off. More refreshing still, Knipfel makes no attempt whatsoever to justify, explain or redeem his emotional state of affairs. Instead, he gets to the crux of that particular kind of intractable depression that hovers somewhere between angst and ennui.
Suicide seems a perfectly sane response to a banal world.
Yet in many respects Knipfel's world seems anything but banal. Odd things happen to him. In the preface Knipfel notes that the chances of suffering both retinitis pigmentosa and a lesion-inducing traumatic brain injury are about 1 in 65,000. Just his luck. What makes Jim Knipfel interesting is that he has no interest in making himself likeable.