Jed Lipinski
An air of comical amphetamine dependence pervades Martin Millar’s debut novel, Milk, Sulphate, and Alby Starvation. The protagonist, Alby, is a twenty-six-year-old paranoiac and small-time sulphate (i.e., speed) dealer convinced that both Chinese gangsters and the Milk Marketing Board have contracts out on his life. The book’s plot is chopped into raucous little sections that seem to reflect the characters’ short attention spans, while its sentences, in their haste to catalog the chaos, often forgo punctuation entirely. Indeed, one comes to feel thoroughly under the influence of Millar’s lively, hurtling prose. Jim Knipfel is perhaps best known for his first book, Slackjaw (1999), an improbably hilarious account of his affliction with paranoia, depression, and retinitis pigmentosa, a genetic disease that left him legally blind by his thirties. He has since written two more memoirs: a chronicle of his stay at a psychiatric clinic and a skeptical meditation on spirituality as a cure for suffering. Knipfel’s hardships, and the fierce wit he has developed to endure them, would seem to make him uniquely qualified to weather any bleak terrain with his sense of humor intact— even a dystopian future.