Slackjaw By Jim Knipfel Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, 256 pp., $22.95 Buy this book more books most popular most commented A G.I.'s Strange War Tale by Sean Gardiner Horacio Castellanos Moya Does the Twisted by Jed Lipinski The 2008 New Yorker Cartoon Standings by BRIAN PARKS Sasa Stanisic Turns Gruesome History Beautiful by Sidra Durst Rivka Galchen's Twisty Mistaken Identities by zach baron Trash Talking With Harvey Weinstein by Tony Ortega Coming and Then Licking It Up. Is This a Gay Thing? Savage Love by Dan Savage At Home With Competitive Swallowers Crazy Legs and Eater X by Andy Kropa Gene Simmons and the Whores He Admires La Dolce Musto by Michael Musto Columbia's Knotty Noose Problem by Graham Rayman The 'W.' Stands for 'War Criminal' (17) Nat Hentoff Scientology's Crushing Defeat (16) Tony Ortega Runnin' Scared: From Brooklyn, a Rap Campaign Against Tight Clothes (9) Runnin' Scared: Arcynta Ali Childs Runnin' Scared: The City Pitted Kids Against Artists in the East Village (6) Runnin' Scared: Chloé A. Hilliard Savage Love: My Boyfriend Almost Fathered a Lesbian Couple's Baby?!? (5) Savage Love: Dan Savage

Slackjaw never quite finds a direction, though. Knipfel wanders through his life anecdote by anecdote, rambling on about his self-destructive impulses, collegiate pranks, petty larceny, drunken excesses, slacker jobs, and pretty much everything vaguely weird that's ever happened to him. He identifies with the narrator of Dostoyevsky's Notes From Underground, though his eagerness to milk a good yarn out of everything makes him seem less despairing than grumpy. There's some fine black farce in his faux-suicidal bravado— his response to a letter-writer's threat to kill him in two weeks is "I was frustrated that he was making me wait that long"— but eventually it comes off like the kind of tough-guy pose that's really a plea for pity.

About a third of Slackjaw suggests the better book it might have been, focused on Knipfel's progressive vision loss and his bitter preparations for blindness. Here, he gets a lot more mileage out of his smartass observations and pungent sketches: shopping for a cane, training to survive a fall onto subway tracks, taking "Blind Man classes." These stories are more original than the tall tales about his goofy punk band, and they're better written, relying on the grim comedy of the situation rather than sledgehammer hyperbole. Knipfel's still using the exaggerated language of old-man bars, but the way he fleshes out his absurd world from the few visual details he can make out gives the end of his book the dry poignancy the rest of it gropes for.