Up Up, Down Down: Essays

From the first page, Tin House editor Knapp’s roundhouse, fullmouthed style takes a firmly tongue-in-cheek approach to the existential crises of male maturity for the millennial generation. College drinking games, UFO hunting, wrestling, tennis, and skateboarding prove platforms for launching Knapp’s mind-stretching reveries on literary influence (notably, in his case, by David Foster Wallace), nostalgia, identity, and adulthood. Threaded with the theme of “authenticity” and haunted by paternal loss, Knapp’s philosophizing is kept lively by exuberant and sometimes acerbically funny descriptions, as of the “oniony-ripe academic BO” given off by Harold Bloom’s prose. Meanwhile, his ingrained empathy for others, as when he reacts with horrified embarrassment to a young woman’s public bathing-suit malfunction, rescues his personal reflections from the trap of navel-gazing, “the sticky wicket of self-consciousness.” The real subject throughout is language—Knapp observes that “to learn to say something is to learn to see it” and that experiences don’t become real for him until they’re “all dolled up in the dinner jacket of syntax”—and his exuberant joy in its music, which comes through in long Latinate sentences and jaw-cracking multisyllabic words (readers may find themselves looking up “borborygmic” or “desuetude”). This intelligent take on coming-of-age deserves to be widely read, if only for its effortless-seeming form and its expression of how style and content are irrevocably intertwined. (Feb.)