QUITTING THE NAIROBI TRIO: A MEMOIR
by Jim Knipfel (J. P. Tarcher) $23

In the late 1980s, after a failed suicide attempt precipitated a complete psychotic break, Jim Knipfel found himself locked in a Minneapolis psych ward, armed only with a tome of impenetrable essays by French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. The premise is as absurd as it is terrifyingly real. Quitting the Nairobi Trio is the engaging account of Knipfel's lengthy stint in the loony bin, a place that "was like being no place at all." In a series of succinctly rendered episodes--full of oddball compassion, comic confusion, and disarming charm--the author of Slackjaw leads a guided tour of his no-exit asylum and its variously addled inhabitants.

The structure of this quite amazing book straightjackets its material perfectly: Knipfel intersperses chapters of sardonic commentary and unsentimental observations regarding the monotonous (non) goings-on in the ward with harrowing, multi-layered recollections of his descent into chemical madness. He recounts the journey in seductive plainspeak, treating highly ambivalent perceptions ("a fetid stew of noxious chemicals swirling around my brain") with a brand of off-the-cuff, self-deprecating humor that borders on the sublimely casual--as though it's all no big deal, really.

In fact, Knipfel's organic talents as a raconteur lead you skipping so easily and rapidly across the surfaces of crackpot events that gleaning the nightmarishness of the actual situation is an act of inference and imagination: The tragedy hits only when you set the book down, or trip on a passage such as this, dropped like a road cone on reality's one-way: "Sanity, I realized now, was a distinctly overrated attribute. One thing I had forgotten, though... was that nobody ever talks about how painful madness can be." A great and honest memoir, with hidden depths and unrepentant humanity. RICK LEVIN

VENUS DRIVE
by Sam Lipsyte (Open City Books) $13.95

Sam Lipsyte's debut collection of stories escorts us through the inner workings of numerous doom-and-gloomers, folks who have trouble connecting with what remains of their lives, who expect the least, who think they have nothing left to prove. As an ex-girlfriend tells a jaded ex-boyfriend in "My Life, For Promotional Use Only": "Nothing's wrong with you.... You just peaked a little early." But these are the kind of characters who are less self-absorbed than introspective. They design odd thoughts and philosophies that explode and melt into amazing language: "There you are, cuffed in the back seat while your pissed-off retard cop-uncle pulls off the curb and drives you far, far away from the big soft couch where your girlfriend is all alone with her juicer on frappé, just hoping you'll come back like you half-assed threatened to, and now you are driving cruel distances from anything that could be reasonably called joy."

Venus Drive packs more generational commentary/knockout punch than most books I've read. Memorable stories like "Admiral of the Swiss Navy" (which takes place at a summer camp where kids look at porn mags and abuse fat kids) and "The Drury Girl" (where a father urges his son to examine his testicles every day--"Did you check your people today?") are stunning and slightly uncomfortable. It's Lipsyte's bravery, his singular language that makes him one hell of a writer. KEVIN SAMPSELL

LOST AND FOUND

CIRCUS AND CULTURE: A SEMIOTIC APPROACH
by Paul Bouissac (Indiana 1976, University Press of America 1985)

Paul Bouissac, who once ran a circus and now teaches semiotics, adroitly focuses on the element of risk as he examines what makes the circus go, as well as what makes people go to the circus. Basically, the circus is a language, a system of codes understood from culture to culture. Despite cultural differences, acts based on taking risks have universal appeal.

Somewhere among Bouissac's diagrams and formulae of acrobatic acts and museum photos of performers in the ring, I realized that this collection of essays is the greatest show on earth. What I mean (and anyone who begins to delve into the world of signifiers, signs, and referents must deal with the meaning of everything) is that this is the greatest book ever published.

True, Bouissac's unusual application of a rigorous intellectual discipline to the arena of supreme physical accomplishment risks losing readers, as speeches to general audiences give way to articles for academics; but he comes through it all with verve and élan.

My claims for Circus and Culture, however, have nothing to do with the education of circus folk or graduate students. Taken as a whole, Bouissac's discoveries are coherent, well conceived, and important; but the parts, the elegant sentences charged with performing spectacular leaps, have a beauty that at once defies and defines gravity. DOUG NUFER