Up Up, Down Down: Essays

by Cheston Knapp

For fans of John Jeremiah Sullivan and Wells Tower, a “glittering,” (Leslie Jamison), “always smart, often hilarious, and ultimately transcendent” (Anthony Doerr) linked essay collection from the managing editor of Tin House that brilliantly explores the nature of identity.

Daring and wise, hilarious and tender, Cheston Knapp’s exhilarating collection of seven linked essays, Up Up, Down Down , tackles the Big Questions through seemingly unlikely avenues. In his dexterous hands, an examination of a local professional wrestling promotion becomes a meditation on pain and his relationship with his father. A profile of UFO enthusiasts ends up probing his history in the church and, more broadly, the nature and limits of faith itself. Attending an adult skateboarding camp launches him into a virtuosic analysis of nostalgia. And the shocking murder of a neighbor expands into an interrogation of our culture’s prevailing ideas about community and the way we tell the stories of our lives. Even more remarkable, perhaps, is the way he manages to find humanity in a damp basement full of frat boys.

Taken together, the essays in Up Up, Down Down amount to a chronicle of Knapp’s coming-of-age, a young man’s journey into adulthood, late-onset as it might appear. He presents us with formative experiences from his childhood to marriage that echo throughout the collection, and ultimately tilts at what may be the Biggest Q of them what are the hazards of becoming who you are?

With “an ordnance of wit” (Wells Tower) and “a prose style that feels both extravagant and exact, and a big, booming heart” (Maggie Nelson), Up Up, Down Down signals the arrival of a truly one-of-a-kind voice.

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction, Memoir

320 pages, Hardcover

First published February 6, 2018

Reviews

[Lauren · Rating 4 out of 5]

Knapp reminds me why I love narrative nonfiction and personal essays so much.

While all of the essays are strong, the last two were specific highlights for me.

"Neighborhood Watch" relates the murder or a neighbor, questioning how we know and interact with the people who live around us. Some big questions here, and the takeaway is that I really need to learn my neighbor's last names.

"Something's Gotta Stick" is the longest of the book, a treatise on nostalgia, reliving the past, and skateboarding.
A small flavor:

To talk about or expose the particulars of one's nostalgiais like relating a dream or a drug experience: one should do it sparingly, if at all. Like dreams and drug experiences, nostalgia entails a considerable amount of amplification, which is to say distortion. Faced with a time of our lives that we cannot return to, we manufacture ad hoc relics, invest things from that time with a significance and meaning that's peculiar to us, to our notions of home and who we are.

[Marcie Lacerte · Rating 4 out of 5]

Everything leads up to the skateboarding essay. THE SKATEBOARDING ESSAY.

[Thomas · Rating 3 out of 5]

I mostly enjoyed these essays, especially Neighborhood Watch and Something Must Stick. I live in Portland, and I'm not much older than the author, Cheston Knapp, and so guess I related to a lot of the content and coming-of-age aspects of the narrative. The entire collection reads a bit like a memoir as much as an essay collection. The writing is smart, clever, and very thought-provoking. However, I couldn't help but feel there's a lot here that's overwritten, or perhaps feels labored. I'm also not sure I got the point of the collection, other than to throw some ideas out for me to ponder on without really providing any answers or conclusions. That could be the fault of my reading, and not the author, but everything just lacked a cohesion to me.

Another aspect of this collection that I didn't care for was Knapp constantly quoting other authors, almost like he was citing every idea for a class essay. This broke the flow and made the author seem insecure. I also felt like the author spent too much time consulting a thesaurus while writing instead of just creating beautiful prose. Once again, it inhibits the flow a reader might get into. The topics are weighty and thought-provoking enough without the need to consult a dictionary every third page. I did notice less of this style in the latter part of the final essay, and the writing really opened up for me and demonstrated what Knapp is capable of doing.

All that said, I'm actually looking forward to reading more from the author. He gives you a lot to unpack, and perhaps that was the goal of Up Up, Down Down.

[Corey · Rating 3 out of 5]

Listened to the audiobook, and was kind of underwhelmed. Part of it might be the audiobook format itself. Unless something wonky is going on with my Audible app, each essay seems to have been recorded in one take, as there are several places here where lines are stumbled over or garbled. And whoever is in charge of these things chose to have the author himself read the book, which I think is a mistake. The writing is highbrow, energetic, and clever, but Knapp delivers it in this SoCal-ish, lax-bro monotone, which creates a weird dissonance between what he's saying and how he says it.

Also, the Foster Wallace comparisons are unwarranted, even if one of the essays does discuss him briefly. Knapp's work is simply different--it doesn't try as hard to make the reader laugh, there's none of the recursive self-consciousness of Wallace here, and there's less intellectual rigor to a lot of these essays. Intellectual rigor isn't the point--Knapp, in this collection, is trying to figure out what makes him tic, or his relationships to objects and people. It doesn't have the same sociocultural ambitions as a lot of Wallace's essays do.

None of the essays are bad, exactly, but almost none of them grabbed me, except maybe the last essay about a 30-something Knapp attending a skateboarding camp.

[Deadohiosky77 · Rating 5 out of 5]

These essays are phenomenal. Cheston Knapp effortlessly articulates thoughts and feelings we all experience into highly relatable and beautifully written essays. At times very deep, thought provoking, and often hilarious insights on life. I highly recommend this collection to anyone who enjoys the beauty of well written works and a gorgeous use of words.

[Sherry · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first half of this book was not terribly interesting for me. The second half brought a lot more feeling and relatability. And while Knapp is a talented writer, his style meanders and rambles a bit much for my taste.

[LISA HUBER · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wityy, Witty, Witty!!!!! Hilarious journey written in a way that everyone wishes they could write something. So relatable and I found myself constantly thinking I totally get that but I would never be able to articulate it in such an amazing way. Super easy read. I highly recommend!!

[Jeana]

I read a couple of the essays and while they're fun to read (and really funny at times), this is very masculine writing and not really what I'm in the mood for right now.

[Garrett Zecker · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read about this excellent collection from editor of Tin House editor Cheston Knapp in the New York Times Book Review and decided to pick it up. I was surprised at the beautifully tuned execution of these pieces. Every one reminds me of one of those songs like The Tragically Hip's 'At Transformation' where, at the beginning it feels like the musicians are all playing completely different songs, but then as the piece develops, they come together in this unique and beautiful way as all of the plates they're spinning were not entirely independent of one another at all but rather all contribute to an amazing freight train of sound. Knapp's writing style dances around several subjects at once until you realize their interdependence and codependent meaning. Each piece is flawlessly executed, and covers topics like suicide, tennis, skateboarding, videogames, relationships, fraternities, and much more. Knapp balances the often hilarious with the dramatic and profane, and wandering through his rhetorical maze is an engaging and enjoyable journey.

By far, my favorite piece in the collection was Mysteries We Live With, somehow combining the study of UFOs with the beauty of loving someone and the nature of organized religion. The rest of the pieces in the collection are just as amazing. Wonders abound as each sentence is a brilliant, sprawling feat of language and meaning. Heck, I don't know when the last time I saw the words 'tintinnabulation' and 'papoose' in the same essay, but I was giddy with excitement to see them. Pick this one up. It's genius.

[dachs.what.she.read · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was a decent read. I really liked 5 of the 7 essays. My favorites were “Beirut”, “Mysteries We Live With”, and “Neighborhood Watch”. The collection in total deals with Knapp’s battle to rectify his understanding of religion, his current place in the world, and his relationship with his father. He has a unique ability to seemingly stray into a tangent and just when you’ve about given up he brings it back. Most of the time this enriches his questioning process and invites you to look back on your life a little harder with nostalgia. This method lost me at times when coupled with his penchant for marrying words that don’t come up often or... ever. I think I would have enjoyed listening to him read it better. Perhaps I should have chosen Audible for this one. I will say he’s an interesting character. I don’t often associate frat guy with enough Christian shame to shut down a makeout sesh and then as an adult later admit he’s chosen to cradle a grown man in distress because he knows it’ll sound better when he writes it that way. Do we all do that for our own memories or for the sake of a role we are playing at the time? He’s a thinker. Not a book for the ✈️.

[Richard Noggle · Rating 3 out of 5]

Knapp often seems to use his ostensible subjects as a way of getting at bigger and more personal themes: a piece on regional professional wrestlers becomes a look at his fraught relationship with his father; a piece on a UFO expert becomes an examination of his own erosion of Christian faith over the years. This is fine, except sometimes the ostensible subjects get a bit lost amidst the bigger picture. A better balance is struck in the two long final pieces: a murder in a gentrifying Portland neighborhood melds well with thoughts on community and storytelling; a trip to an "adult skate camp" becomes a moving piece on nostalgia and maturation. Knapp's style is hyper-maximalist, clearly indebted to David Foster Wallace: one piece about tennis (naturally!) becomes mostly about his efforts to escape the "anxiety of influence" surrounding DFW. He hasn't escaped it, however, and for every precise and hilarious description there's two more that seem to be working a little overtime and trying a little too hard to send you to the dictionary.

[Kevin Krein · Rating 2 out of 5]

whoooooooooo boy.
i don't even know how i came across this book. maybe it was on here, in a list of 'titles you may enjoy,' or maybe it was in a similar place on a website like amazon.
this was a chore to get through. but books just don't really hit the same way anymore when you aren't reading things by hanif abdurraqib. like, the volume is just turned down on everything, even if you want to like it.
there are parts of this that are absolutely insufferable. knapp can really turn an awkward, grating phrase. but in the same breath, there are parts of this that were devastating, funny, and wild. he can tell a good story, but there's a difference between the telling, and the execution in writing.
knapp is only, like, a year older than me, based on the clues he gives throughout these essays. we've lived very, very different lives but the one thing that kept me going through this, especially through the last, sprawling essay, was about the dangers of nostalgia.
he is right about that.

[Alex McElroy · Rating 5 out of 5]

An intelligent and moving collection of essays on everything from manhood, grief, artistic influence, and tennis. These pieces are lyrical and compelling portraits of how one evolves into an artist and the life of a reader. Knapp writes masterful sentences, and these essays are sure to stick with me for a long time. Favorites include "Faces of Pain" and "Far From Me."

[Christine · Rating 2 out of 5]

A series of essays on life and the observation of life. We learn a little about fraternity house life and about the nature of relationships. It was just too interpersonal and too introspective -- that is, you'd have to be the writer or perhaps the wife of the writer to really understand what's going on. I did enjoy the essay about attending skateboard camp.

[Lea Nelligan · Rating 2 out of 5]

I often found myself feeling like the essays were overwritten. Knapp is a bit tangential and sometimes hard to follow. It felt like he was flexing his vocabulary at points and it took away from what he was getting it. Don’t get me wrong, there were some nuggets of great prose, and interesting stories though overall the overwriting took away from all of that for me.

[Courtney Maum · Rating 5 out of 5]

My dear friend Cheston managed to remind me in this book that he is smarter than I am, more sensitive than I am, and truly gifted with the written word. These essays are funny, informative, kind of weird (in the best way), risk-taking, and often heart breaking, as only the best non fiction is.

[Tyler · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an exciting debut collection of seven long-form personal essays. These essays evoke John Jeremiah Sullivan’s "Pulphead". But Knapp has a style uniquely his own.

On one level, his essays cover neighborhood happenings, a small-town professional wrestling league, a group of UFO chasers, a skateboard camp, college drinking games, or a youth summer retreat. On another, these subjects become grounds to explore bigger questions.

Throughout these essays, Knapp opens himself up with an unabashed honestly like the Godfather of the personal essay, Montaigne. He explores questions of faith, memory, spirituality, family, and relationships without artifice or shield.

I must admit, there’s much about Knapp’s essays that resonate with me on a personal level (we hail from the same home town; we’re the same age and came of age in the ‘90s; we both went to southern colleges/universities where we dabbled in Greek life; we’re both avid readers and fans of a lot of the same authors). So perhaps I saw more in these essays than the average reader.

But there’s an undeniable universal appeal to them also, given Knapp’s unwavering honesty and openness, his authentic and resonant voice.

Knapp also has fun with language. He has knack for playful simile, like this explanation for a creaky bed he slept on while at a religious summer camp back in his teen years, “The bed sounded like someone trying to drive stick.”

Or in "Far From Me", a touching essay about ambition, literature, and youth, we get this hilarious explanation of the star tennis player Rafael Nadal, “the southpaw Spaniard whose buggy whip forehand makes him rather resemble a male stripper twirling undies above his head.”

But underneath this playful voice is a more serious, soul-searching thinker and writer, plying language to better understand the world around him, while concurrently understanding words’ limitations when it comes to the most confounding and beautiful mysteries.

In this way, Knapp both exalts language as savior, and recognizes the Sisyphean absurdity of thinking it will provide any definite answers.

In "Something’s Gotta Stick", he tells the story of attending a skateboard camp as an adult to perhaps reconnect with his lost youth. We learn in this story where the entire collection of essays gets its title, “The past was no longer simply the place I’d come from, the future no longer where I was headed. Up could be down…”

He continues, “…and back and forth in this I lost touch with whatever had previously grounded me. A dizzying experience, a seasickness of the soul, that had me scrambling for a foothold, for something solid to stand on.”
Knapp evokes here the temporary sense of vertigo that can befall any soul-searcher. Throughout this essay and the others, Knapp explores different paths out of this disorientation. Language, words, and books – they provide a beacon of light; but often prove mere Siren song.

As a writer, Knapp tells us he often suffers from being “curvatus in se, bent hopelessly inward upon myself.”
Is this not the occupational hazard of the thinking and writing life? Once the writer-voice and critic gets going, it can be hard to turn-off. It can be hard to simply be there, to be present in the moment. Words while providing thoughts that may provide us answers, ultimately turn us inward and risk cutting us off.

In "Mysteries We Live With", Knapp evokes a helpful metaphor to expound on this central theme, “Scuba divers sometimes talk about going so far down that their water world is all the same dark color…In such moments they can become so disoriented they’re no longer able to discern up from down.”

As we plunge deeper into our own soul, searching for answers to the mysteries that confound us, we risk the diver’s “nauseating vertigo” that comes from being caught in between, from being neither “up” or “down”.

Knapp ponders this purgatorial state, “Can one make it through the world as a half-believer….a wishy-washy unwillingness to commit to either side?” Either side here being a life of steadfast faith versus one of unwavering religious skepticism.

Throughout these essays, Knapp wrestles with the paradoxical nature of language as a possible air-tank to take us either ever deeper into the water’s dark depths, or back towards the light of the its surface, to anywhere more certain, “On the one hand I want to maintain, at almost any cost, a reasonable, enlightenment-like skepticism; and on the other I deeply want to have the skepticism radically upended.” But yet, he seems to suggest, he has neither. He’s stuck in the middle, constantly questioning.

But in the end, that’s ok - his essays celebrate. Knapp’s very searching and lack of certitude, his willingness to stay in this uncertain place and share his experiences is what make these essays so appealing and full of inspiration.
We aren’t given any façade. We’re not being sold any false sense of confidence. We’re taken on a journey. One that doesn’t run in fear from the uncertainty of the world “in between” – but instead, dwells there. And by dwelling there, Knapp unveils beauties in mystery that perhaps others more readily miss in an unconscious hurry to turn away from them.

[Izzy Macpherson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Knapp fills this book with what seems like a whole dictionary of vocabulary. The author's hypothesis on family, authenticity, and nostalgia express that he is a deep thinker. Both of these factors make the novel a slow and thought-provoking read.

[Shannon Whitehead · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is good writing. These are clean sentences. Knapp's exploration of identity was a fun read and an education for me in the art of personal essay writing. It was definitely a chronicle of the white male experience but I still enjoyed it.

*This review is based on a free digital advance copy provided by the publisher. The opinions expressed are my own.

[Tara Mickela · Rating 3 out of 5]

Needs to be older to be so existential.

[Casey · Rating 2 out of 5]

one man's life, overwritten.

[Bec · Rating 3 out of 5]

Parts of Beruit was my favorite, as someone who always wanted to fit in, but never really bowed to peer pressure to do so I found it both relatable and complexing

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

So much more than a collection of essays. An insightful look into significance, belonging, nostalgia and fun words. With jokes! Loved it!