david foster wallace michael joyce essay

The String Theory

What happens when all of a man's intelligence and athleticism is focused on placing a fuzzy yellow ball where his opponent is not? An obsessive inquiry (with footnotes), into the physics and metaphysics of tennis.

When Michael T. Joyce of Los Angeles serves, when he tosses the ball and his face rises to track it, it looks like he's smiling, but he's not really smiling–his face's circumoral muscles are straining with the rest of his body to reach the ball at the top of the toss's rise. He wants to hit it fully extended and slightly out in front of him–he wants to be able to hit emphatically down on the ball, to generate enough pace to avoid an ambitious return from his opponent. Right now, it's 1:00, Saturday, July 22, 1995, on the Stadium Court of the Stade Jarry tennis complex in Montreal. It's the first of the qualifying rounds for the Canadian Open, one of the major stops on the ATP's "hard-court circuit," [1] which starts right after Wimbledon and climaxes at N.Y.C.'s U.S. Open. The tossed ball rises and seems for a second to hang, waiting, cooperating, as balls always seem to do for great players. The opponent, a Canadian college star named Dan Brakus, is a very good tennis player. Michael Joyce, on the other hand, is a world-class tennis player. In 1991, he was the top-ranked junior in the United States and a finalist at Junior Wimbledon [2] is now in his fourth year on the ATP Tour, and is as of this day the seventy-ninth-best tennis player on planet earth.

A tacit rhetorical assumption here is that you have very probably never heard of Michael Joyce of Brentwood, L.A. Nor of Tommy Ho of Florida. Nor of Vince Spadea nor Jonathan Stark nor Robbie Weiss nor Steve Bryan–all ranked in the world's top one hundred at one point in 1995. Nor of Jeff Tarango, sixty-eight in the world, unless you remember his unfortunate psychotic breakdown in full public view during last year's Wimbledon [3] .

You are invited to try to imagine what it would be like to be among the hundred best in the world at something. At anything. I have tried to imagine; it's hard.

Stade Jarry's Center Court, known as the Stadium Court, can hold slightly more than ten thousand souls. Right now, for Michael Joyce's qualifying match, there are ninety-three people in the crowd, ninety-one of whom appear to be friends and relatives of Dan Brakus's. Michael Joyce doesn't seem to notice whether there's a crowd or not. He has a way of staring intently at the air in front of his face between points. During points, he looks only at the ball.

The acoustics in the near-empty stadium are amazing–you can hear every breath, every sneaker's squeak, the authoritative pang of the ball against very tight strings.

Professional tennis tournaments, like professional sports teams, have distinctive traditional colors. Wimbledon's is green, the Volvo International's is light blue. The Canadian Open's is–emphatically–red. The tournament's "title sponsor," du Maurier cigarettes, has ads and logos all over the place in red and black. The Stadium Court is surrounded by a red tarp festooned with corporate names in black capital letters, and the tarp composes the base of a grandstand that is itself decked out in red-and-black bunting, so that from any kind of distance, the place looks like either a Kremlin funeral or a really elaborate brothel. The match's umpire and linesmen and ball boys all wear black shorts and red shirts emblazoned with the name of a Quebec clothier [4] .

.css-f6drgc:before{margin:-0.99rem auto 0 -1.33rem;left:50%;width:2.1875rem;border:0.3125rem solid #FF3A30;height:2.1875rem;content:'';display:block;position:absolute;border-radius:100%;} .css-1aglugu{font-family:Lausanne,Lausanne-fallback,Lausanne-roboto,Lausanne-local,Arial,sans-serif;font-size:1.625rem;line-height:1.2;margin:0rem;}@media(max-width: 48rem){.css-1aglugu{font-size:1.75rem;line-height:1.2;}}@media(min-width: 64rem){.css-1aglugu{font-size:2.375rem;line-height:1.2;}}.css-1aglugu b,.css-1aglugu strong{font-family:inherit;font-weight:bold;}.css-1aglugu em,.css-1aglugu i{font-style:italic;font-family:inherit;}.css-1aglugu:before{content:'＂';display:block;padding:0.3125rem 0.875rem 0 0;font-size:3.5rem;line-height:0.8;font-style:italic;font-family:Lausanne,Lausanne-fallback,Lausanne-styleitalic-roboto,Lausanne-styleitalic-local,Arial,sans-serif;} You can hear every breath, every sneaker's squeak, the authoritative pang of the ball against very tight strings.

Stade Jarry's Stadium Court is adjoined on the north by Court One, or the Grandstand Court, a slightly smaller venue with seats on only one side and a capacity of forty-eight hundred. A five-story scoreboard lies just west of the Grandstand, and by late afternoon both courts are rectangularly shadowed. There are also eight nonstadium courts in canvas-fenced enclosures scattered across the grounds. There are very few paying customers on the grounds on Saturday, but there are close to a hundred world-class players: big spidery French guys with gelled hair, American kids with peeling noses and Pac-10 sweats, lugubrious Germans, bored-looking Italians. There are blank-eyed Swedes and pockmarked Colombians and cyberpunkish Brits. Malevolent Slavs with scary haircuts. Mexican players who spend their spare time playing two-on-two soccer in the gravel outside the players' tent. With few exceptions, all the players have similar builds–big muscular legs, shallow chests, skinny necks, and one normal-size arm and one monstrously huge and hypertrophic arm. Many of these players in the qualies, or qualifying rounds, have girlfriends in tow, sloppily beautiful European girls with sandals and patched jeans and leather backpacks, girlfriends who set up cloth lawn courts [5] . At the Radisson des Gouverneurs, the players tend to congregate in the lobby, where there's a drawsheet for the qualifying tournament up on a cork bulletin board and a multilingual tournament official behind a long desk, and the players stand around in the air-conditioning in wet hair and sandals and employ about forty languages and wait for results of matches to go up on the board and for their own next matches' schedules to get posted. Some of them listen to headphones; none seem to read. They all have the unhappy and self-enclosed look of people who spend huge amounts of time on planes and in hotel lobbies, waiting around–the look of people who must create an envelope of privacy around themselves with just their expressions. A lot of players seem extremely young–new guys trying to break into the tour–or conspicuously older–like over thirty–with tans that look permanent and faces lined from years in the trenches of tennis's minor leagues.

The Canadian open, one of the ATP tour's "Super 9" tournaments, which weigh most heavily in the calculations of world ranking, officially starts on Monday, July 24. What's going on for the two days right before it is the qualies. This is essentially a competition to determine who will occupy the seven slots in the Canadian Open's main draw designated or "qualifiers." A qualifying tourney precedes just about every big-money ATP event, and money and prestige and lucrative careers are often at stake in qualie matches, and often they feature the best matches of the whole tournament, and it's a good bet you've never heard of qualies.

The realities of the men's professional-tennis tour bear about as much resemblance to the lush finals you see on TV as a slaughterhouse does to a well-presented cut of restaurant sirloin. For every Sampras-Agassi final we watch, there's been a weeklong tournament, a pyramidical single-elimination battle between 32, 64, or 128 players, of whom the finalists are the last men standing. But a player has to be eligible to enter that tournament in the first place. Eligibility is determined by ATP computer ranking. Each tournament has a cutoff, a minimum ranking required to be entered automatically in the main draw. Players below that ranking who want to get in have to compete in a kind of pretournament tournament. That's the easiest way to describe qualies. I'll try to describe the logistics of the Canadian Open's qualies in just enough detail to communicate the complexity without boring you mindless.

The du Maurier Omnium Ltée has a draw of sixty-four. The sixteen entrants with the highest ATP rankings get "seeded," which means their names are strategically dispersed in the draw so that, barring upsets, they won't have to meet one another until the latter rounds. Of the seeds, the top eight–here, Andre Agassi, Pete Sampras, Michael Change, the Russian Yevgeny Kafelnikov, Croatia's Goran Ivanisevic, South Africa's Wayne Ferreira, Germany's Michael Stich, and Switzerland's Marc Rosset, respectively–get "byes," or automatic passes, into the tournament's second round. This means that there is actually room for fifty-six players in the main draw. The cutoff for the 1995 Canadian Open isn't fifty-six, however, because not all of the top fifty-six players in the world are here [6] . Here, the cutoff is eighty-five. You'd think that this would mean that anybody with an ATP ranking of eighty-six or lower would have to play the qualies, but here, too, there are exceptions. The du Maurier Omnium Ltée, like most other big tournaments, has five "wild card" entries into the main draw. These are special places given either to high-ranked players who entered after the six-week deadline but are desirable to have in the tournament because they're big stars (like Ivanisevic, number six in the world but a notorious flakeroo who supposedly "forgot to enter till a week ago") or to players who ranked lower than eighty-fifth whom the tournament wants because they are judged "uniquely deserving."

By the way, if you're interested, the ATP tour updates and publishes its world ranking weekly, and the rankings constitute a nomological orgy that makes for truly first-rate bathroom reading. As of this writing, Mahesh Bhudapathi is 284th, Luis Lobo 411th. There's Martin Sinner and Guy Forget. There's Adolf Musil and Jonathan Venison and Javier Frana and Leander Paes. There's–no kidding–Cyril Suk. Rodolfo Ramos-Paganini is 337th, Alex Lopez-Moron is 174th. Gilad Bloom is 228th and Zoltan Nagy is 414th. Names out of some postmodern Dickens: Udo Riglewski and Louis Gloria and Francisco Roig and Alexander Mronz. The twenty-ninth-best player in the world is named Slava Dosedel. There's Claude N'Goran and Han-Cheol Shin (276th but falling fast) and Horacio de la Peña and Marcus Barbosa and Amos Mansdorf and Mariano Hood. Andres Zingman is currently ranked two places above Sander Groen. Horst Skoff and Kris Goossens and Thomas Hogstedt are all ranked higher than Martin Zumpft. One reason the industry sort of hates upsets is that the ATP press liaisons have to go around teaching journalists how to spell and pronounce new names.

The Canadian qualies themselves have a draw of fifty-six world-class players; the cutoff for qualifying for the qualies is an ATP ranking of 350th [7] . The qualies won't go all the way through to the finals, only to the quarterfinals: The seven quarterfinalists of the qualies will receive first-round slots in the Canadian Open [8] . This means that a player in the qualies will need to win three rounds–round of fifty-six, round of twenty-eight, round of fourteen–in two days to get into the first round of the main draw [9] .

The eight seeds in the qualies are the eight players whom the Canadian Open officials consider most likely to make the quarters and thus get into the main draw. The top seed this weekend is Richard Krajicek [10] a six-foot-five-inch Dutchman who wears a tiny white billed hat in the sun and rushes the net like it owes him money and in general plays like a rabid crane. Both his knees are bandaged. He's in the top twenty and hasn't had to play qualies for years, but for this tournament he missed the entry deadline, found all the wild cards already given to uniquely deserving Canadians, and with phlegmatic Low Country cheer decided to go ahead and play the weekend qualies for the match practice. The qualies' eight seed is Jamie Morgan, an Australian journeyman, around one hundredth in the world, whom Michael Joyce beat in straight sets last week in the second round of the main draw at the Legg Mason Tennis Classic in Washington, D.C. Michael Joyce is seeded third.

If you're wondering why Joyce, who's ranked above the number-eighty-five cutoff, is having to play the Canadian Open qualies, gird yourself for one more smidgen of complication. The fact is that six weeks before, Joyce's ranking was not above the cutoff, and that's when the Canadian entry deadline was, and that's the ranking the tournament used when it made up the main draw. Joyce's ranking jumped from 119th to 89th after Wimbledon 1995, where he beat Marc Rosset (ranked 11th in the world) and reached the round of sixteen.

The qualie circuit is to professional tennis sort of what AAA baseball is to the major leagues: Somebody playing the qualies in Montreal is an undeniably world-class tennis player, but he's not quite at the level where the serious TV and money are. In the main draw of the du Maurier Omnium Ltée, a first-round loser will earn $5,400, and a second-round loser $10,300. In the Montreal qualies, a player will receive $560 for losing in the second round and an even $0.00 for losing in the first. This might not be so bad if a lot of the entrants for the qualies hadn't flown thousands of miles to get here. Plus, there's the matter of supporting themselves in Montreal. The tournament pays the hotel and meal expenses of players in the main draw but not of those in the qualies. The seven survivors of the qualies, however, will get their hotel expenses retroactively picked up by the tournament. So there's rather a lot at stake–some of the players in the qualies are literally playing for their supper or for the money to make airfare home or to the site of the next qualie.

You could think of Michael Joyce's career as now kind of on the cusp between the majors and AAA ball. He still has to qualify for some tournaments, but more and more often he gets straight into the main draw. The move from qualifier to main-draw player is a huge boost, both financially and psychically, but it's still a couple of plateaus away from true fame and fortune. The main draw's 64 or 128 players are still mostly the supporting cast for the stars we see in televised finals. But they are also the pool from which superstars are drawn. McEnroe, Sampras, and even Agassi had to play qualies at the start of their careers, and Sampras spent a couple of years losing in the early rounds of main draws before he suddenly erupted in the early nineties and started beating everybody.

Still, even most main-draw players are obscure and unknown. An example is Jakob Hlasek [11] a Czech who is working out with Marc Rosset on one of the practice courts this morning when I first arrive at Stade Jarry. I notice them and go over to watch only because Hlasek and Rosset are so beautiful to see–at this point, I have no idea who they are. They are practicing ground strokes down the line–Rosset's forehand and Hlasek's backhand–each ball plumb-line straight and within centimeters of the corner, the players moving with compact nonchalance I've since come to recognize in pros when they're working out: The suggestion is of a very powerful engine in low gear. Jakob Hlasek is six foot two and built like a halfback, his blond hair in a short square Eastern European cut, with icy eyes and cheekbones out to here: He looks like either a Nazi male model or a lifeguard in hell and seems in general just way too scary ever to try to talk to. His backhand is a one-hander, rather like Ivan Lendl's, and watching him practice it is like watching a great artist casually sketch something. I keep having to remember to blink. There are a million little ways you can tell that somebody's a great player–details in his posture, in the way he bounces the ball with his racket head to pick it up, in the way he twirls the racket casually while waiting for the ball. Hlasek wears a plain gray T-shirt and some kind of very white European shoes. It's midmorning and already at least 90 degrees, and he isn't sweating. Hlasek turned pro in 1983, six years later had one year in the top ten, and for the last few years has been ranked in the sixties and seventies, getting straight into the main draw of all the tournaments and usually losing in the first couple of rounds. Watching Hlasek practice is probably the first time it really strikes me how good these professionals are, because even just fucking around Hlasek is the most impressive tennis player I've ever seen [12] . I'd be surprised if anybody reading this article has ever heard of Jakob Hlasek. By the distorted standards of TV's obsession with Grand Slam finals and the world's top five, Hlasek is merely an also-ran. But last year, he made $300,000 on the tour (that's just in prize money, not counting exhibitions and endorsement contracts), and his career winnings are more than $4 million, and it turns out his home base was for a time Monte Carlo, where lots of European players with tax issues end up living.

Michael Joyce, twenty-two, is listed in the ATP Tour Player Guide as five eleven and 165 pounds, but in person he's more like five nine. On the Stadium Court, he looks compact and stocky. The quickest way to describe him would be to say that he looks like a young and slightly buff David Caruso. He is fair-skinned and has reddish hair and the kind of patchy, vaguely pubic goatee of somebody isn't quite old enough yet to grow real facial hair. When he plays in the heat, he wears a hat ]13] . He wears Fila clothes and uses Yonex rackets and is paid to do so. His face is childishly full, and though it isn't freckled, it somehow looks like it ought to be freckled. A lot of professional tennis players look like lifeguards–with that kind of extreme tan that looks like it's penetrated to the subdermal layer and will be retained to the grave–but Joyce's fair skin doesn't tan or even burn, though he does get red in the face when he plays, from effort [14] . His on-court expression is grim without being unpleasant; it communicates the sense that Joyce's attentions on-court have become very narrow and focused and intense–it's the same pleasantly grim expression you see on, say, working surgeons or jewelers. On the Stadium Court, Joyce seems boyish and extremely adult at the same time. And in contrast to his Canadian opponent, who has the varnished good looks and Pepsodent smile of the stereotypical tennis player, Joyce looks terribly real out there playing: He sweats through his shirt [15] gets flushed, whoops for breath after a long point. He wears little elastic braces on both ankles, but it turns out they're mostly prophylactic.

It's 1:30 p.m. Joyce has broken Brakus's serve once and is up 3-1 in the first set and is receiving. Brakus is in the multi-brand clothes of somebody without an endorsement contract. He's well over six feet tall, and, as with many large male college stars, his game is built around his serve [16] . With the score at 0-15, his first serve is flat and 118 miles per hour and way out of Joyce's backhand, which is a two-hander and hard to lunge effectively with, but Joyce lunges plenty effectively and sends the ball back down the line to the Canadian's forehand, deep in the court and with such flat pace that Brakus has to stutter-step a little and backpedal to get set up–clearly, he's used to playing guys for whom 118 mumps out wide would be an outright ace or at least produce such a weak return that he could move up easily and put the ball away–and Brakus now sends the ball back up the line, high over the net, loopy with topspin–not all that bad a shot, considering the fierceness of the return, and a topspin shot that'd back most of the tennis players up and put them on the defensive, but Michael Joyce, whose level of tennis is such that he moves in on balls hit with topspin and hits them on the rise [17] moves in and takes the ball on the rise and hits a backhand cross so tightly angled that nobody alive could get to it. This is kind of a typical Joyce-Brakus point. The match is carnage of a particularly high-level sort: It's like watching an extremely large and powerful predator get torn to pieces by an even larger and more powerful predator. Brakus looks pissed off after Joyce's winner and makes some berating-himself-type noises, but the anger seems kind of pro forma–it's not like there's anything Brakus could have done much better, not given what he and the seventy-ninth-best player in the world have in their respective arsenals.

Michael Joyce will later say that Brakus "had a big serve, but the guy didn't belong on a pro court." Joyce didn't mean this in an unkind way. Nor did he mean it in a kind way. It turns out what Michael Joyce says rarely has any kind of spin or slant on it; he mostly just reports what he sees, rather like a camera. You couldn't even call him sincere, because it's not like it seems ever to occur to him to try to be sincere or nonsincere. For a while, I thought that Joyce's rather bland candor was a function of his not being very bright. This judgment was partly informed by the fact that Joyce didn't go to college and was only marginally involved in his high school academics (stuff I know because he told me right away) [18] . What I discovered as the tournament wore on was that I can be kind of a snob and an asshole and that Michael Joyce's affectless openness is not a sign of stupidity but of something else.

Advances in racket technology and conditioning methods over the last decade have dramatically altered men's professional tennis. For much of the twentieth century, there were two basic styles of top-level tennis. The "offensive" [19] style is based on the serve and the net game and is ideally suited to slick, or "fast," surfaces like grass and cement. The "defensive," or "baseline," style is built around foot speed, consistency, and ground strokes accurate enough to hit effective passing shots against a serve-and-volleyer; this style is most effective on "slow" surfaces like clay and Har-True composite. John McEnroe and Bjorn Borg are probably the modern era's greatest exponents of the offensive and defensive styles, respectively.

There is now a third way to play, and it tends to be called the "power baseline" style. As far as I can determine, Jimmy Connors [20] more or less invented the power-baseline game back in the seventies, and in the eighties Ivan Lendl raised it to a kind of brutal art. In the nineties, the majority of players on the ATP Tour have a power-baseline-type game. This game's cornerstone is ground strokes, but ground strokes hit with incredible pace, such that winners from the baseline are not unusual [21] . A power-baseliner's net game tends to be solid but uninspired -- a PBer is more apt to hit a winner on the approach shot and not need to volley at all. His serve is usually competent and reasonably forceful, but the really inspired part of a PBer's game is usually his return of the serve [22] . He often has incredible reflexes and can hit the power and aggression of an offensive style and the speed and calculated patience of a defensive style. It is adjustable both to slick grass and to slow clay, but its most congenial surface is DecoTurf II [23] the type of abrasive hard-court surface now used at the U.S. Open and at all the broiling North American tune-ups for it, including the Canadian Open.

There is now a third way to play, and it tends to be called the "power baseline" style.

Boris Becker and Stefan Edberg are contemporary examples of the classic offensive style. Serve-and-volleyers are often tall [24] and tall Americans like Pete Sampras and Todd Martin and David Wheaton are also offensive players. Michael Chang is a pure exponent of the defensive tour's Western Europeans and South Americans, many of whom grew up exclusively on clay and now stick primarily to the overseas clay-court circuits. Americans Jimmy Arias, Aaron Krickstein, and Jim Courier all play a power-baseline game. So does just about every new young male player on the tour. But its most famous and effective post Lendl avatar is Andre Agassi, who on 1995's hard-court circuit was simply kicking everyone's ass [25] .

Michael Joyce's style is power baseline in the Agassi mold: Joyce is short and right-handed and has a two-handed backhand, a serve that's just good enough to set up a baseline attack, and a great return of serve that is the linchpin of his game. Like Agassi, Joyce takes the ball early, on the rise, so he always looks like he's moving forward in the court even though he rarely comes to the net. Joyce's first serve usually comes in around ninety-five miles per hour [26] and his second serve is in the low eighties but has so much spin on it that the ball turns topological shapes in the air and bounces high and wide to the first-round Canadian's backhand. Brakus has to stretch to float a slice return, the sort of weak return that a serve-and-volleyer would be rushing up to the net to put away on the fly. Joyce does move up, but only halfway, right around his own service line, where he lets the floater land and bounce up all ripe, and he winds up his forehand and hits a winner crosscourt into the deuce corner, very flat and hard, so that the ball makes an emphatic sound as it hits the scarlet tarp behind Brakus's side of the court. Ball boys move for the ball and reconfigure complexly as Joyce walks back to serve another point. The applause of a tiny crowd is so small and sad and tattered-sounding that it'd almost be better if people didn't clap at all.

Like those of Lendl and Agassi and Courier and many PBers, Joyce's strongest shot is his forehand, a weapon of near-Wagnerian aggression and power. Joyce's forehand is particularly lovely to watch. It's sparer and more textbook than Lendl's whip-crack forehand or Borg's great swooping loop; by way of decoration, there's only a small loop of flourish [27] on the backswing. The stroke itself is completely well out in front of him. As with all great players, Joyce's side is so emphatically to the net as the ball approaches that his posture is a classic contrapposto.

As Joyce on the forehand makes contact with the tennis ball, his left hand behind him opens up, as if he were releasing something, a decorative gesture that has nothing to do with the mechanics of the stroke. Michael Joyce doesn't know that his left hand opens up at impact on forehands: It is unconscious, some aesthetic tic that stated when he was a child and is now inextricably hardwired into a stroke that is itself, now, unconscious for Joyce, after years of his hitting more forehands over and over and over than anyone could ever count [28] .

Agassi, who is twenty-five, is kind of Michael Joyce's hero. Just the week before this match, at the Legg Mason Tennis Classic in Washington, in wet-mitten heat that had players vomiting on-court and defaulting all over the place, Agassi beat Joyce in the third round of the main draw, 6-2, 6-2. Every once in a while now, Joyce will look over at his coach next to me in the player-guest section of the Grandstand and grin and say something like, "Agassi'd have killed me on that shot." Joyce's coach will adjust the set of his sunglasses and not say anything–coaches are forbidden to say anything to their players during a match. Joyce's coach, Sam Aparicio [29] a protégé of Pancho Gonzalez's, is based in Las Vegas, which is also Agassi's hometown, and Joyce has several times been flown to Las Vegas at Agassi's request to practice with him and is apparently regarded by Agassi as a friend and peer–these are facts Michael Joyce will mention with as much pride as he evinces in speaking of victories and world ranking.

There are differences between Agassi's and Joyce's games, however. Though Joyce and Agassi both use the western forehand grip and two-handed backhand that are very distinctive of topspinners, Joyce's ground strokes are very flat–i.e., spinless, passing low over the net, driven rather than brushed–because the actual motion of his strokes is so levelly horizontal. Joyce's balls actually look more like Jimmy Connors's balls than like Agassi's [30] . Some of Joyce's ground strokes look like knuckleballs going over the net, and you can actually see the ball's seams just hanging there, not spinning. Joyce also has a slight hitch in his backhand that makes it look stiff and slightly awkward, though his pace and placement are lethal; Agassi's own backhand is flowing and hitchless [31] . And while Joyce is far from slow, he lacks Agassi's otherwordly foot speed. Agassi is every bit as fast as Michael Chang [32] . Watch him on TV sometime as he's walking between points: He takes the tiny, violently pigeon-toed steps of a man whose feet weigh basically nothing.

Michael Joyce also–in his own coach's opinion–doesn't "see" the ball in the same magical way that Andre Agassi does, and so Joyce can't take the ball quite so early or generate quite the same amount of pace off his ground strokes. The business of "seeing" is important enough to explain. Except for the serve, power in tennis is not a matter of strength but of timing. This is one reason why so few top tennis players look muscular [33] . Any normal adult male can hit a tennis ball with a pro pace; the trick is being able to hit the ball both hard and accurately. If you can get your body in just the right position and time your stroke so you hit the ball in just the right spot–waist-level, just slightly out in front of you, with your own weight moving from your back leg to your front leg as you make contact–you can both cream the ball and direct it. Since "… just the right …" is a matter of millimeters and microseconds, a certain kind of vision is crucial [34] . Agassi's vision is literally one in a billion, and it allows him to hit his ground strokes as hard as he can just about every time. Joyce, whose hand-eye coordination is superlative, in the top 1 percent of all athletes everywhere (he's been exhaustively tested), still has to take some incremental bit of steam off most of his ground strokes if he wants to direct them.

I submit that tennis is the most beautiful sport there is [35] and also the most demanding. It requires body control, hand-eye coordination, quickness, flat-out speed, endurance, and that weird mix of caution and abandon we call courage. It also requires smarts. Just one single shot in one exchange in one point of a high-level match is a nightmare of mechanical variables. Given a net that's three feet high (at the center) and two players in (unrealistically) fixed positions, the efficacy of one single shot is determined by its angle, depth, pace, and spin. And each of these determinants is itself determined by still other variables–i.e., a shot's depth is determined by the height at which the ball passes over the net combined with some integrated function of pace and spin, with the ball's height over the net itself determined by the player's body position, grip on the racket, height of backswing and angle of racket face, as well as the 3-D coordinates through which the racket face moves during that interval in which the ball is actually on the strings. The tree of variables and determinants branches out and out, on and on, and then on much further when the opponent's own position and predilections and the ballistic features of the ball he's sent you to hit are factored in [36] . No silicon-based RAM yet existent could compute the expansion of variables for even a single exchange; smoke would come out of the mainframe. The sort of thinking involved is the sort that can be done only by a living and highly conscious entity, and then it can really be done only unconsciously, i.e., by fusing talent with repetition to such an extent that the variables are combined and controlled without conscious thought. In other words, serious tennis is a kind of art.

I submit that tennis is the most beautiful sport there is and also the most demanding.

If you've played tennis at least a little, you probably have some idea how hard a game is to play really well. I submit to you that you really have no idea at all. I know I didn't. And television doesn't really allow you to appreciate what real top-level players can do–how hard they're actually hitting the ball, and with what control and tactical imagination and artistry. I got to watch Michael Joyce practice several times right up close, like six feet and a chain-link fence away. This is a man who, at full run, can hit a fast-moving tennis ball into a one-foot square area seventy-eight feet away over a net, hard. He can do this something like more than 90 percent of the time. And this is the world's seventy-ninth-best player, one who has to play the Montreal qualies.

It's not just the athletic artistry that compels interest in tennis at the professional level. It's also what this level requires–what it's taken for the one-hundredth-ranked player in the world to get there, what it takes to stay, what it would take to rise even higher against other men who've paid the same price number one hundred has paid.

Americans revere athletic excellence, competitive success, and it's more than lip service we pay; we vote with our wallets. We'll pay large sums to watch a truly great athlete; we'll reward him with celebrity and adulation and will even go so far as to buy products and services he endorses.

But it's better for us not to know the kinds of sacrifices the professional-grade athlete has made to get so very good at one particular thing. Oh, we'll invoke lush clichés about the lonely heroism of Olympic athletes, the pain and analgesia of football, the early rising and hours of practice and restricted diets, the preflight celibacy, et cetera. But the actual facts of the sacrifices repel us when we see them: basketball geniuses who cannot read, sprinters who dope themselves, defensive tackles who shoot up with bovine hormones until they collapse or explode. We prefer not to consider closely the shockingly vapid and primitive comments uttered by athletes in postcontest interviews or to consider what impoverishments in one's mental life would allow people actually to think the way great athletes seem to think.  Note the way "up close and personal" profiles of professional athletes strain so hard to find evidence of a rounded human life–outside interests and activities, values beyond the sport. We ignore what's obvious, that most of this straining is farce. It's farce because the realities of top-level athletics today require an early and total commitment to one area of excellence. An ascetic focus [37] . A subsumption of almost all other features of human life to one chosen talent and pursuit. A consent to live in a world that, like a child's world, is very small.

We prefer not to consider closely the shockingly vapid and primitive comments uttered by athletes

Playing two professional singles matches on the same day is almost unheard of, except in qualies. Michael Joyce's second qualifying round is at 7:30 on Saturday night. He's playing an Austrian named Julian Knowle, a tall and cadaverous guy with pointy Kafkan ears. Knowle uses two hands off both sides, [38] and throws his racket when he's mad. The match takes place on Stade Jarry's Grandstand Court. The smaller Grandstand is more intimate: The box seats start just a few yards from the courts surface, and you're close enough to see a wen on Joyce's cheek or the abacus of sweat on Herr Knowle's forehead. The Grandstand could hold maybe forty-eight hundred people, and tonight there are exactly four human beings in the audience as Michael Joyce basically beats the ever-living shit out of Julian Knowle, who will be at the Montreal airport tonight at 1:30 to board a red-eye for a minor-league clay tournament in Poznan, Poland.

During this afternoon's match, Joyce wore a white Fila shirt with different-colored sleeves. Onto his sleeve is sewn a patch that says POWERBAR; Joyce is paid $1,000 each time he appears in the media wearing his patch. For tonight's match, Joyce wears a pinstripe Jim Courier-model Fila shirt with one red sleeve and one blue sleeve. He has a red bandanna around his head, and as he begins to perspire in the humidity, his face turns the same color as the bandanna. It is hard not to find this endearing. Julian Knowle has on an abstract pastel shirt whose brand is unrecognizable. He has very tall hair, Knowle does, that towers over his head at near-Beavis altitude and doesn't diminish or lose its gelled integrity as he perspires [39] . Knowle's shirt, too, has sleeves of different colors. This seems to be the fashion constant this year among the qualifiers: sleeve-color asymmetry.

The Joyce-Knowle match takes only slightly more than an hour. This is including delays caused when Knowle throws his racket and has to go retrieve it or when Knowle walks around in aimless circles, muttering blackly to himself in some High German dialect. Knowle's tantrums seem a little contrived and insincere to me, though, because he rarely loses a point as a result of doing anything particularly wrong. Here's a typical point in this match: It's 1-4 and 15-30 in the sixth game. Knowle hits a respectable 110-mile-an-hour slice serve to Joyce's forehand. Joyce returns a very flat, penetrating drive crosscourt so that Knowle has to stretch and hit his forehand on the run, something that's not particularly easy to do with a two-handed forehand. Knowle gets to the forehand and hits a thoroughly respectable shot, heavy with topspin and landing maybe only a little bit short, a few feet behind the service line, whereupon he reverses direction and starts scrambling back to get in the middle of the baseline to get ready for his next shot. Joyce, as is SOP, has moved in on the slightly short ball and takes it on the rise just after it's bounced, driving a backhand even flatter and harder in the exact same place he hit his last shot, the spot Knowle is scrambling away from. Knowle is now forced to reverse direction and get back to where he was. This he does, and he gets his racket on the ball, but only barely, sending back a weak little USDA Prime loblet that Joyce, now in the vicinity of the net, has little trouble blocking into the open court for a winner. The four people clap, Knowle's racket goes spinning into the blood-colored tarp, and Joyce walks expressionlessly back to the deuce court to receive again whenever Knowle gets around to serving. Knowle has slightly more firepower than the first round's Brakus: His ground strokes are formidable, probably even lethal if he has sufficient time to get to the ball and get set up. Joyce simply denies him that time. Joyce will later admit that he wasn't working all that hard in this match, and he doesn't need to. He hits few spectacular winners, but he also makes very few unforced errors, and his shots are designed to make the somewhat clumsy Knowle move a lot and to deny him the time and the peace ever to set up his game. This strategy is one that Knowle cannot solve or interdict: he has the firepower but not the speed to do so. This may be one reason why Joyce is unaffronted by having to play the qualies for Montreal. Barring some kind of major injury or neurological seizure, he's not going to lose to somebody like Austria's Julian Knowle–Joyce is simply on a different plane than the mass of these qualie players.

The idea that there can be wholly distinct levels to competitive tennis–levels so distinct that what's being played is in essence a whole different game–might seem to you weird and hyperbolic. I have played probably just enough tennis to understand that it's true. I have played against men who were on a whole different, higher plateau than I, and I have understood on the deepest and most humbling level the impossibility of beating them, of "solving their game." Knowle is technically entitled to be called a professional, but he is playing a fundamentally different grade of tennis from Michael Joyce's, one constrained by limitations Joyce does not have. I feel like I could get on a tennis court with Julian Knowle. He would beat me, perhaps handily, but I don't feel like it would be absurd for me to occupy the same seventy-eight-by-twenty-seventy-foot rectangle as he. The idea of me playing Joyce–or even hitting around with him, which was one of the ideas I was entertaining on the flight to Montreal–is now revealed to me to be in a certain way obscene, and I resolve not even to let Joyce [40] know that I used to play competitive tennis, and (I'd presumed) rather well. This makes me sad.

This article is about Michael Joyce and the realities of the tour, not me. But since a big part of my experience of the Canadian Open and its players was one of sadness, it might be worthwhile to spend a little time letting you know where I'm coming from vis-à-vis these players. As a young person, I played competitive junior tennis, traveling to tournaments all over the Midwest, the region that the United States Tennis Association has in its East Coast wisdom designated to the "western" region. Most of my best friends were also tennis players, and on a regional level we were successful, and we thought of ourselves as extremely good players. Tennis and our proficiency at it were tremendously important to us–a serious junior gives up a lot of his time and freedom to develop his game [41] and it can very easily come to constitute a big part of his identity and self-worth. The other fourteen-year-old Midwest hotshots and I knew that our fishpond was somehow limited; we knew that there was a national level of play and that there were hotshots and champions at that level. But levels and plateaus beyond our own seemed abstract, somehow unreal –those of us who were the best in our region literally could not imagine players our own age who were substantially better than we.

A child's world tends to be very small. If I'd been just a little bit better, an actual regional champion, I would have gotten to see that there were fourteen-year-olds in the United States playing a level of tennis unlike anything I knew about. My own game as a junior was a particular type of the classic defensive style, a strategy Martin Amis once described as "craven retrieval." I didn't hit the ball all that hard, but I rarely made unforced errors, and I was fast, and my general approach was simply to keep hitting the ball back to my opponent until my opponent fucked up and either made an unforced error or hit a ball so short and juicy that even I could hit a winner off it. It doesn't look like a very glorious or even interesting way to play, now that I see it here in bald retrospective print, but it was interesting to me, and you'd be surprised how effective it was (on the level at which I was competing, at least). At age twelve, a good competitive player will still generally miss after four or five balls (mostly because he'll get impatient or grandiose). At age sixteen, a good player will generally keep the ball in play for more like seven or eight shots before he misses. At the collegiate level, too, opponents were stronger than junior players but not markedly more consistent, and if I could keep a rally going to seven or eight shots, I could usually win the point on the other guy's mistake [42] . I still play–not competitively, but seriously–and I should confess that deep down inside, I still consider myself an extremely good tennis player, very hard to beat. Before coming to Montreal to watch Michael Joyce, I'd seen professional tennis only on television, which, as has been noted, does not give the viewer a very accurate picture of how good pros are. I thus further confess that I arrived in Montreal with some dim unconscious expectation that these professionals–at least the obscure ones, the nonstars–wouldn't be all that much better than I. I don't mean to imply that I'm insane: I was ready to concede that age, a nasty ankle injury in 1988, and a penchant for nicotine (and worse) meant that I wouldn't be able to compete physically with a young unhurt professional, but on TV (while eating junk and smoking), I'd seen pros whacking balls at each other that didn't look to be moving substantially faster than the balls I'd hit. In other words, I arrived at my first professional tournament with the pathetic deluded pride that attends ignorance. And I have been brought up sharply. I do not play and never have played even the same game as these qualifiers.

The craven game I'd spent so much of my youth perfecting would not work against these guys. For one thing, pros simply do not make unforced errors–or, at any rate, they make them so rarely that there's no way they are going to make the four unforced errors in seven points necessary for me to win a game. Another thing, they will take any ball that doesn't have simply ferocious depth and pace on it and–given even a fractional moment to line up a shot–hit a winner off it. For yet another thing, their own shots have such ferocious depth and pace that there's no way I'd be able to hit more than a couple of them back at any one time. I could not meaningfully exist on the same court with these obscure, hungry players. Nor could you. And it's not just a matter of talent or practice. There's something else.

Once the main draw starts, you get to look up close and live at name tennis players you're used to seeing only as arras of pixels. One of the highlights of Tuesday's second round of the main draw is getting to watch Agassi play MaliVai Washington. Washington, the most successful U.S. black man on the tour since Arthur Ashe, is unseeded at the Canadian Open but has been ranked as high as number eleven in the world and is dangerous, and since I loathe Agassi with a passion, it's an exciting match. Agassi looks scrawny and faggy and, with his shaved skull and beret-ish hat and black shoes and socks and patchy goatee, like somebody just released from reform school (a look you can tell he's carefully decided on with the help of various paid image consultants). Washington, who's in dark-green shorts and a shirt with dark-green sleeves, was a couple of years ago voted by People magazine on of the Fifty Prettiest Human Beings or something, and on TV is real pretty but in person is awesome. From twenty yards away, he looks less like a human being than like a Michelangelo anatomy sketch: his upper body the V of serious weight lifting, his leg muscles standing out even in repose, his biceps little cannonballs of fierce-looking veins. He's beautiful and doomed, because the slowness of the Stadium Court makes it impractical for anybody but a world-class net man to rush the net against Agassi, and Washington is not a net man but a power-baseliner. He stays back and trades ground strokes with Agassi, and even though the first set goes to a tiebreaker, you can tell it's a mismatch. Agassi has less mass and flat-out speed than Washington, but he has timing and vision that give his ground strokes way more pace. He can stay back and hit nuclear ground strokes and force Washington until Washington eventually makes a fatal error. There are two ways to make an error against Agassi: The first is the standard way, hitting it out or into the net; the second is to hit anything shorter than a couple of feet inside the baseline, because anything that Agassi can move up on, he can hit for a winner. Agassi's facial expression is the slightly smug self-aware one of somebody who's used to being looked at and who automatically assumes the minute he shows up anywhere that everybody's looking at him. He's incredible to see play in person, but his domination of Washington doesn't make me like him any better; it's more like it chills me, as if I'm watching the devil play.

Television tends to level everybody out and make everyone seem kind of blandly good-looking, but at Montreal it turns out that a lot of the pros and stars are interesting-or even downright funny-looking. Jim Courier, former number one but now waning and seeded tenth here [43] , looks like Howdy Doody in a hat on TV but here turns out to be a very big boy–the "Guide Média" lists him at 175 pounds, but he's way more than that, with big smooth muscles and the gait and expression of a Mafia enforcer. Michael Chang, twenty-three and number five in the world, sort of looks like two different people stitched crudely together: a normal upper body perched atop hugely muscular and totally hairless legs. He has a mushroom-shaped head, inky-black hair, and an expression of deep and intractable unhappiness, as unhappy a face as I've seen outside a graduate creative-writing program [44] . Pete Sampras is mostly teeth and eyebrows in person and has unbelievably hairy legs and forearms–hair in the sort of abundance that allows me confidently to bet that he has hair on his back and is thus at least not 100 percent blessed and graced by the universe. Goran Ivanisevic is large and tan and surprisingly good-looking, at least for a Croat; I always imagine Croats looking ravaged and emaciated, like somebody out of a Munch lithograph–except for an incongruous and wholly absurd bowl haircut that makes him look like somebody in a Beatles tribute band. It's Ivanisevic who will beat Joyce in three sets in the main draw's second round. Czech former top-ten Petr Korda is another classic-looking mismatch: At six three and 160, he has the body of an upright greyhound and the face of–eerily, uncannily–a freshly hatched chicken (plus soulless eyes that reflect no light and seem to see only in the way that fishes' and birds' eyes see).

Television tends to level everybody out and make everyone seem kind of blandly good-looking, but at Montreal it turns out that a lot of the pros and stars are interesting-or even downright funny-looking.

And Wilander is here–Mats Wilander, Borg's heir and top-ten at eighteen, number one at twenty-four, now thirty and basically unranked and trying to come back after years off the tour, here cast in the role of the wily mariner, winning on smarts. Tuesday's best big-name match is between Wilander and Stefan Edberg, twenty-eight and Wilander's own heir [45] and now married to Annette Olsen, Wilander's SO during his glory days, which adds a delicious personal cast to the match, which Wilander wins 6-4 in the third. Wilander ends up getting all the way to the semifinals before Agassi beats him as badly as I have ever seen one professional beat another professional, the score being 6-2, 6-0, and the match not nearly as close as the score would indicate.

Even more illuminating than watching pro tennis live is watching it with Sam Aparicio. Watching tennis with him is like watching a movie with somebody who knows a lot about the technical aspects of film: He helps you see things you can't see alone. It turns out, for example, that there are whole geometric sublevels of strategy in a power-baseline game, all dictated by various PBers' strength and weaknesses. A PBer depends on being able to hit winners from the baseline. But, as Sam teaches me to see, Michael Chang can hit winners only at an acute angle from either corner. An "inside-out" player like Jim Courier, though, can hit winners only at obtuse angles from the center out. Hence, wily and well-coached players tend to play Chang "down the middle" and Courier "out wide." One of the things that make Agassi so good is that he's capable of hitting winners from anywhere on the court–he has no geometric restriction. Joyce, too, according to Sam, can hit a winner at any angle. He just doesn't do it quite as well as Agassi, or as often.

Michael Joyce in close-up, viewed eating supper or riding in a courtesy car, looks slighter and younger than he does on-court. Close-up, he looks his age, which to me is basically that of a fetus. Michael Joyce's interests outside tennis consist mostly of big-budget movies and genre novels of the commercial-paperback sort that one reads on airplanes. He has a tight and long-standing group of friends back home in L.A., but one senses that most of his personal connections have been made via tennis. He's dated some. It's impossible to tell whether he's a virgin. It seems staggering and impossible, but my sense is that he might be. Then again, I tend to idealize and distort him, I know, because of how I feel about what he can do on a tennis court. His most revealing sexual comment was made in the context of explaining the odd type of confidence that keeps him from freezing up in a match in front of large crowds or choking on a point when there's lots of money at stake [46] . Joyce, who usually needs to pause about five beats to think before he answer a questions, thinks the confidence is partly a matter of temperament and partly a function of hard work and practice.

"If I'm in like a bar, and there's a really good-looking girl, I might be kind of nervous. But if there's like a thousand gorgeous girls in the stands when I'm playing, it's a different story. I'm not nervous then, when I play, because I know what I'm doing. I know what to do out there." Maybe it's good to let these be his last quoted words.

Whether or not he ends up in the top ten and a name anybody will know, Michael Joyce will remain a paradox. The restrictions on his life have been, in my opinion, grotesque; and in certain ways Joyce himself is a grotesque. But the radical compression of his attention and sense of himself have allowed him to become a transcendent practitioner of an art–something few of us get to be. They've allowed him to visit and test parts of his psychic reserves most of us do not even know for sure we have (courage, playing with violent nausea, not choking, et cetera).

Joyce is, in other words, a complete man, though in a grotesquely limited way. But he wants more. He wants to be the best, to have his name known, to hold professional trophies over his head as he patiently turns in all four directions for the media. He wants this and will pay to have it–to pursue it, let it define him–and will pay up with the regretless cheer of a man for whom issues of choice became irrelevant a long time ago. Already, for Joyce, at twenty-two, it's too late for anything else; he's invested too much, is in too deep. I think he's both lucky and unlucky. He will say he is happy and mean it. Wish him well.

1. Comprising Washington, D.C., Montreal, Los Angeles, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, New Haven, and Long Island, this is possibly the most grueling part of the yearly ATP Tour (as the erstwhile Association of Tennis Professionals Tour is now officially known), with three-digit temperatures and the cement courts shimmering like Moroccan horizons and everyone wearing a hat and even the spectators carrying sweat towels.

2. Joyce lost that final to Thomas Enqvist, now ranked in the ATP's top twenty and a potential superstar and in high profile attendance here in Montreal.

3. Tarango, twenty-seven, who completed three years at Stanford, is regarded as something of a scholar by Joyce and the other young Americans on tour. His little bio in the 1995 ATP Tour Player Guide lists his interests as including, 'philosophy, creative writing, and bridge,' and his slight build and receding hairline do in fact make him look more like an academic or a tax attorney than a world-class tennis player. Also a native Californian, he's a friend and something of a mentor to Michael Joyce, whom he practices with regularly and addresses as 'Grasshopper.' Joyce–who seems to like everybody–likes Jeff Tarango and won't comment on his on-court explosion at Wimbledon except to say that Tarango is 'a very intense guy, very intellectual, that gets kind of paranoid sometimes.'

4. An economical way to be a tournament sponsor: supply free stuff to the tournament and put your name on it in really big letters. All the courts' tall umpire chairs have signs that say TROPICANA; all the bins for fresh and un-fresh towels say WAMSUTTA; the drink coolers at courtside (the size of trash barrels, with clear plastic lids) say TROPICANA and EVIAN. Those players who don't individually endorse a certain brand of drink tend, as a rule, to drink Evian, orange juice being a bit heavy for on-court rehydration.

5. Most of the girlfriends have something indefinable about them that suggests extremely wealthy parents whom the girls are pissing off by hooking up with an obscure professional tennis player.

6. Except for the four in the Grand Slam–Wimbledon and the U.S., French, and Australian opens–no tournament draws all the top players, although every tournament would obviously like to, since the more top players are entered, the better the paid attendance and the more media exposure the tournament gets for itself and its sponsors. Players in the top twenty or so, though, tend to play a comparatively light schedule of tournaments, taking time off not only for rest and training but to compete in wildly lucrative exhibitions that don't affect ATP ranking. (We're talking wildly lucrative, like millions of dollars per annum for the top stars.) Given the sharp divergence of interests between tournaments and players, it's not surprising that there are Kafkanly complex rules for how many ATP tournaments a player must enter each year to avoid financial or ranking-related penalties, and commensurately complex and crafty ways players have for getting around these rules and doing pretty much what they want. These will be passed over. The thing to realize is that players of Michael Joyce's station tend to take way less time off; they play just about every tournament they can squeeze in and get to unless they're forced by injury or exhaustion to sit out a couple of weeks. This is because they need to, not just financially but because under the ATP's (very complex) set of algorithms for determining ranking, most players fare better the more tournaments they enter.

7. There is no qualifying tournament for the qualies themselves, though some particularly huge tournaments have metaqualies. The qualies also have a number of wild-card berths, most of which here are given to Canadian players, like the collegiate legend whom Michael Joyce is beating the shit out of right now in the first round.

8. These places are usually right near the top seeds, which is the reason why in the televised first rounds of major tournaments you usually see Agassi or Sampras beating the shit out of some totally obscure guy–that guy's usually a qualifier. It's also part of why it's so hard for somebody low-ranked enough to have to play the qualies to move up in the rankings enough that he doesn't have to play qualies anymore–he usually meets a high-ranked player in the very first round and gets smeared.

9. Another reason qualifiers usually get smeared by the top players they face in the early rounds is that the qualifier is playing his fourth or fifth match in three days, while the top player usually has had a couple of days with his masseur or creative-visualization consultant to get ready for the first round. Michael Joyce details all these asymmetries and stacked odds the way a farmer speaks of weather, with an absence of emotion that seems deep instead of blank.

10. Pronounced kry -chek.

11. Pronounced ya -kob h la -sick, if that helps.

12. Joyce is even more impressive, but I hadn't seen Joyce yet. And Enqvist is even more impressive than Joyce, and Agassi is even more impressive than Enqvist. After the week was over, I truly understood why Charlton Heston looks gray and ravaged on his descent from Sinai: Past a certain point, impressiveness is corrosive to the psyche.

13. During his two daily one-hour practice sessions, he wears the hat backward and also wears boxy plaid shorts that look for all the world like swim trunks. His favorite practice T-shirt has FEAR: THE ENEMY OF DREAMS on the chest. He laughs a lot when he practices. You can tell just by looking at him out there that he's totally likable and cool.

14. If you've played only casually, it is probably hard to understand how physically demanding really serious tennis is. Realizing that these pros can move one another from one end of the twenty-seven-foot baseline to the other pretty much at will and that they hardly ever end a point by making an unforced error might help your imagination. A close best-of-three-set match is probably equivalent in its demands to a couple of hours of full court basketball, but we're talking serious basketball.

15. Something else you don't get a good sense of on television: Tennis is a very sweaty game. On ESPN or whatever, when you see a player walk over to the ball boy after a point and request a towel and quickly wipe his arm and hand off and toss the towel back to the (rather luckless) ball boy, most of the time the towel thing isn't a stall or a meditative pause–it's done because sweat is running down the inside of the player's arm in such volume that it's getting all over his hand and making the racket slippery. Especially on the sizzling North American summer junket, players sweat through their shirts early on and sometimes also their shorts. And they drink enormous amounts of water–staggering amounts. I thought I was seeing things at first, watching matches, as players seem to go through one of those skinny half-liter Evian bottles every second side change, but Michael Joyce confirmed it. Pro-grade tennis players seem to have evolved a metabolic system that allows rapid absorption of water and its transformation into sweat. (Most players I spoke with confirmed, by the way, that Gatorade and All-Sport and Boost and all those pricey sports drinks are mostly bullshit; that salt and carbs at table and small lakes of daily H2O are the way to go. The players who didn't confirm this turned out to be players who had endorsement deals with some pricey-sports-drink manufacturer, but I personally saw at least one such player dumping out his bottled pricey electrolyte contents and replacing them with good old water for his match.)

16. The taller you are, the harder you can serve (get a protractor and figure it out), but the less able to bend and reverse direction you are. Tall guys tend to be serve-and-volleyers, and they live and die by their serves. Bill Tilden, Stan Smith, Arthur Ashe, Roscoe Tanner, and Goran Ivanisevic were/are all tall guys with serve-dependent games. And so on.

17. This is mind-bogglingly hard to do when the ball's hit hard. If we can assume you've played Little League or sandlot ball or something, imagine the hardest-hit grounder of all time coming at you at shortstop, and you not standing and waiting to try to knock it down but actually of your own free will running forward toward the grounder, then trying not just to catch it in a big glove but to strike it hard and reverse its direction and send it someplace frightfully specific and very far away–this comes close.

18. Joyce could have gone to college, but if he'd gone to college, it would have been primarily to play tennis. Coaches at major universities apparently offered Joyce inducements to come play for them so literally outrageous and incredible that I wouldn't repeat them here even if Joyce hadn't asked me not to.

The reason Michael Joyce would have gone to college primarily to play tennis is that the academic and social aspects of collegiate life interest him about as much as hitting twenty-five hundred crosscourt forehands while a coach yells at you in foreign languages interests you. Tennis is what Michael Joyce loves and lives for and is. He sees little point in telling anybody anything different. It's the only thing he's devoted himself to, and he's devoted massive amounts of himself to it, and, as far as he understands it, it's all he wants to do or be involved in. Because he started playing at age two and playing competitively at age seven and had the first half-dozen years of his career directed rather, shall we say, forcefully and enthusiastically by his father (who Joyce estimates probably spent around $250,000 on lessons and court time and equipment and travel during Michael's junior career), it's perhaps reasonable to ask Joyce to what extent he chose to devote himself to tennis. Can you choose something when you are forcefully and enthusiastically immersed in it at an age when the resources and information necessary for choosing are not yet yours?

Joyce's response to this line of inquiry strikes me as both unsatisfactory and totally satisfactory. Because the question is unanswerable, or at least it's unanswerable by a person who's already–as far as he understands it– chosen . Joyce's answer is that it doesn't really matter much to him whether he originally 'chose' serious tennis or not; all he knows is that he loves it. He tries to explain the U.S. juniors, which he won in 1991: 'You get there and look at the draw; it's a 128 draw–there's so many guys you have to beat. And then it's all over and you've won, you're the national champion–there's nothing like it. I get chills even talking about it.' Or just the previous week in Washington: 'I'm playing Agassi, and it's great tennis, and there's nothing like thousands of fans going nuts. I can't describe the feeling. Where else could I get that?'

What he says is understandable, but it's not the satisfactory part of the answer. The satisfactory part is the way Joyce's face looks when he talks about what tennis means to him. He loves it–you can see this in his face when he talks about it: His eyes normally have a kind of Asiatic cast because of a slight epicanthic fold common to ethnic Irishmen, but when he speaks of tennis and his career, the eyes get round and the pupils dilate and the look in them is one of love. The love is not the love one feels for a job or a lover or any of the loci of intensity that most of us choose to call the things we love. It's the sort of love you see in the eyes of really old people who've been married for an incredibly long time or in religious people who are so religious, they've devoted their whole lives to religious stuff: It's the sort of love whose measure is what it's cost, what one's given up for it. Whether there's 'choice' involved is, at a certain point, of no interest ... since it's the surrender of choice and self that informs the love in the first place.

19. Aka serve-and-volley, see immediately supra .

20. I don't know whether you know this, but Connors had one of the most eccentric games in the history of tennis -- he was an aggressive 'power' player who rarely came to the net, had the serve of an ectomorphic girl, and hit everything totally spinless and flat (which is inadvisable on ground strokes because the absence of spin makes the ball so hard to control). His game was all the more strange because the racket he generated all his firepower from the baseline with was a Wilson T2000, a weird steel thing that's one of the shittiest tennis rackets ever made and is regarded by most serious players as useful only for home defense or prying large rocks out of your backyard or something. Connors was addicted to this racket and kept using it long after Wilson stopped even making it, and he forfeited millions in potential endorsement money by doing so. Connors was also eccentric (and kind of repulsive) in lots of other ways, too, none of which are germane to this article.

21. In the yore days before wide-body ceramic rackets and scientific strength training, the only two venues for hitting winners used to be the volley–where your decreased distance from the net allowed for greatly increased angle (get that protractor out)–and the defensive passing shot, i.e., in the tactical language of boxing, 'punch' versus 'counterpunch.' The new power-baseline game allows a player, in effect, to punch his opponent all the way from his stool in the corner; it changes absolutely everything, and the analytic geometry of these changes would look like the worst calculus final you ever had in your life.

22. This is one reason why the phenomenon of 'breaking serve' in a set is so much less important when a match involves power-baseliners. It is one reason why so many older players and fans no longer like to watch pro tennis as much: The structural tactics of the game are now ineluctably different from when they played.

23. A trademark of the Wichita, Kans., Kock Materials Company, 'a leader in asphalt-emulsions technology.'

24. John McEnroe wasn't all that tall, and he was arguably the best serve-and-volley man of all time, but then McEnroe was an exception to pretty much every predictive norm there was. At his peak (say 1980-1984), he was the greatest tennis player who ever lived–the most talented, the most beautiful, the most tormented: a genius. For me, watching McEnroe don a blue polyester blazer and do stiff lame truistic color commentary for TV is like watching Faulkner do a Gap ad.

25. One answer to why public interest in men's tennis has been on the wane in recent years is an essential and unpretty thuggishness about the power-baseline style that's become dominant on the tour. Watch Agassi closely sometime–for so small a man and so great a player, he's amazingly absent of finesse, with movements that look more like a heavy-metal musician's than an athlete's.

The power-baseline game itself has been compared to metal or grunge. But what a top PBer really resembles is film of the old Soviet Union putting down a rebellion. It's awesome, but brutally so, with a grinding, faceless quality about its power that renders that power curiously dull and empty.

26. Compare Ivanisevic's at 136 miles per hour or Sampras's at 132 or even this Brakus kid's at 118.

27. The loop in a pro's backswing is kind of the trademark flourish of excellence and consciousness of the same, not unlike the five-star chef's quick kiss of his own fingertips as he presents a piece or the magician's hand making a French curl in the air as he directs our attention to his vanished assistant.

28. All serious players have these little extraneous tics, stylistic fingerprints, and the pros even more so because of years of repetition and ingraining. Pros' tics have always been fun to note and chart, even just e.g. on the serve. Watch the way Sampras' lead foot rises from the heel on his toss, as if his left foot's toes got suddenly hot. The odd Tourettic way Gerulaitis used to whip his head from side to side while bouncing the ball before the toss, as if he were having a small seizure. McEnroe's weird splayed stiff-armed service stance, both feet parallel to the baseline and his side so severely to the net that he looked like a figure on an Egyptian frieze. The odd sudden shrug Lendl gives before releasing his toss. The way Agassi shifts his weight several times from foot to foot as he bounces before the toss like he needs desperately to pee. Or, here at the Canadian Open, the way the young star Thomas Enqvist's body bends queerly back as he tosses, limboing away from the toss, as if for a moment the ball smelled very bad. This tic derives from Enqvist's predecessor Edberg's own weird spinal arch and twist on the toss. Edberg also has this strange sudden way of switching his hold on the racket in mid-toss, changing from an eastern forehand to an extreme backhand grip, as if the racket were a skillet.

29. Who looks a bit like a Hispanic Dustin Hoffman and is an almost unbelievably nice guy, with the sort of inward self-sufficiency of truly great teachers and coaches everywhere, with the Zen-like blend of focus and calm developed by people who have to spend enormous amounts of time sitting in one place watching closely while somebody else does something. Sam gets 10 percent of Joyce's gross revenues and spends his time in airports reading gigantic tomes on Mayan architecture and is one of the coolest people I've ever met either inside the tennis world or outside it (so cool I'm kind of scared of him and haven't once called him since the assignment ended, if that makes sense). In return, Sam travels with Joyce, rooms with him, coaches him, supervises his training, analyzes matches with him, and attends him in practice, even to the extent of picking up errant balls so that Joyce doesn't have to spend part of his tightly organized practice time picking up errant balls. The stress and weird loneliness of pro tennis, where everybody's in the same community and sees one another every week but is constantly on the diasporic move and is one another's rival, with enormous amounts of money at stake and life essentially a montage of airports and bland hotels and non-home-cooked food and courtesy cars and nagging injuries and staggering long-distance bills, and with people's families back home tending to be wackos, since only wackos would make the financial and temporal sacrifices necessary to let their offspring become good enough at something to turn pro at it–all this means that most players lean heavily on their coaches for emotional support and friendship as well as technical counsel. Sam's role with Joyce looks to me to approximate what in the latter century was called that of 'companion,' those older ladies who traveled with nubile women when they traveled abroad.

30. Agassi's balls look more like Borg's balls would have looked if Borg had been on a yearlong regimen of both steroids and methamphetamines and was hitting every single fucking ball just as hard as he could. Agassi hits his ground strokes as hard as anybody who's ever played tennis–so hard you almost can't believe it in person.

31. But Agassi does have this exaggerated follow-through in which he keeps both hands on the racket and follows through almost like a hitter in baseball, which causes his shirtfront to lift and his hairy tummy to be exposed to public view–in Montreal I found this repellent, though the females in the stands around me seem ready to live and die for a glimpse of Agassi's tummy. Agassi's significant other, Brooke Shields, is in Montreal, by the way, and will end up highly visible in the player-guest box for all Agassi's matches wearing big sunglasses and what look to be multiple hats. This may be the place to insert that Brooke Shields is rather a lot taller than Agassi and considerably less hairy, and that seeing them standing together in person is rather like seeing Sigourney Weaver on the arm of Danny DeVito. The effect is especially surreal when Brooke is wearing one of the plain, classy sundresses that make her look like a deb summering in the Hamptons and Agassi's wearing his new Nike on-court ensemble, a blue-black horizontally striped outfit that together with his black sneakers makes him look like somebody's idea of a French Resistance fighter. (Since we all enjoy celeb stuff, this might also be the place to insert an unkind but true observation. Up close in person, Brooke Shields is in fact extremely pretty, but she is not at all sexy. Her eyebrows are actually not nearly as thick/bushy as Groucho's or Brezhnev's, but she's incredibly tall, and her posture's not all that great, and her prettiness is that sort of computer-enhanced-looking prettiness that is resoundingly unsexy. To find somebody sexy, I think you actually have to be able to imagine having sex with them, and something intrinsically remote and artificial about Brooke Shields makes it possible to imagine jacking off to a picture of her but not to imagine actually having sex with her.)

32. Some tennis writer somewhere observed of Michael Chang that whereas all pros up at net will run back to retrieve a lob placed over their heads, Chang is the only pro known sometimes to run back and retrieve passing shots .

33. Though note that very few of them wear eyeglasses, either.

34. A whole other kind of vision–the kind attributed to Larry Bird in basketball, sometimes, when he's made those incredible surgical passes to people who nobody else could even see were open–is required when you're hitting: This involves seeing the other side of the court–where your opponent is and which direction he's moving in and what possible angles are open to you in consequence of where he's going. The schizoid thing about tennis is that you have to use both kinds of vision–ball and court–at the same time.

35. Basketball comes close, but it's a team sport and lacks tennis' primal mano a mano intensity. Boxing might come close–at least at the lighter weight divisions–but the actual physical damage the fighters inflict on each other makes it too concretely brutal to be really beautiful–a level of abstraction and formality (i.e., 'play') is necessary for a sport to possess true metaphysical beauty (in my opinion).

36. For those of you into business stats, the calculus of a shot in tennis would be rather like establishing a running compound-interest expansion in a case in which not only is the rate of interest itself variable and not only are the determinants of that rate variable and not only is the amount of time during which the determinants influence the interest rate variable, but the principle itself is variable.

37. Sex and substance issues notwithstanding, professional athletes are our culture's holy men: They give themselves over to a pursuit, endure great privation and pain to actualize themselves at it, and enjoy a relationship to 'excellence' and 'perfection' that we admire and reward (the monk's begging bowl, the RBI guru's eight-figure contract) and like to watch, even though we have no inclination to walk that road ourselves. In other words, they do it for us, sacrifice themselves for our redemption.

38. Meaning a two-handed forehand, whose pioneer was a South African named Frew McMillan and whose most famous practitioner today is Monica Seles.

39. The idea of what it would be like to perspire heavily with huge amounts of gel in your hair is sufficiently horrific to me that I approach Knowle after the match to ask him about it, only to discover that neither he nor his coach spoke enough English–or even French–to be able to determine who I was, and the whole sweat-and-gel issue will, I'm afraid, remain a matter for your own imagination.

40. Who is clearly such a fundamentally nice guy that he would probably hit around with me for a little while just out of politeness, since for him it would be at worst a little bit dull. For me, though, it would be, as I said, a little obscene.

41. The example of Michael Joyce's childhood, though, shows me that we were comparative sluggards, dilettantes. He described his daily schedule: 'I'd be in school till 2:00. Then, after, I'd go [driven by father] to the [West End Racquet] Club [in Torrance, California] and have a lesson with [legendary, wildly expensive, and unbelievably hard-ass Robert] Lansdorp [former childhood coach of, among others, Tracy Austin] from 3:00 to 4:00. Then I'd have drills from 4:00 to 6:00, then we'd drive all the way home–it's like half an hour–and I'm like, 'Thank God, I can finally watch TV or go up and talk with [my friends] on the phone or something,' but Dad is like, 'You didn't practice your serve yet.' At twelve or thirteen [years old], you're not going to want to do it. [No lie, since two hours of serious drills alone were enough to put me in a fetal position for the rest of the day.] You need somebody to make you do it. But then, after like a hundred or so serves, I start to get into it [standing by himself out in the Joyce's tennis court in their backyard with a huge bucket of balls and hitting serve after serve to no one in the gathering twilight], I like it–I'm glad I'm doing it.'

42. An important variable I'm skipping is that children are (not surprisingly) immature and tend to get angry with themselves when they fuck up, and so a key part of my strategy involved putting the opponent in a position where he made a lot of unforced errors and got madder and madder at himself, which would ruin his game: Feelings of self-disgust at his errors or (even better for me) bitter grievance at the universe for making him have 'bad luck' or an 'off day' would mount until, usually by sometime in the second set, he'd sink into a kind of enraged torpor and expect to miss or occasionally even have a kind of grand Learesque tantrum, complete with racket hurling and screamed obscenities and sometimes tears. This happened less and less as I got older and opponents got more mature, and by the time I was in college, only genuine head cases could be counted on to get so mad that they'd basically make themselves lose to an inferior player. It's something of a shock, then, to watch Joyce do to his third-round opponent what I used to do to twelve-year-old rich kids, which is essentially to retrieve and avoid errors and wait for this opponent to have a temper tantrum. Because Sunday was a rain-out, Joyce's third round is played Monday at 10:00 A.M., at the same time that some of the main draw's first rounds are beginning. Joyce's opponent is a guy named Mark Knowles, twenty-three, a 1986 U.S. junior indoor champion, a native of the Bahamas, now known primarily as a doubles player but still a serious opponent, ranked in the world's top two hundred, somebody on Joyce's plateau.

Knowles is tall and thin–muscular in the corded way tall thin people are muscular–and has an amazing tan and tight blonde curls and from a distance is an impressive-looking guy, though up close he has a kind of squished, buggy face and the slightly bulging eyes of a player who is spring-loaded on a tantrum. There's a chance to see Knowles up close because he and Joyce play their match on one of the minor courts, where spectators stand and lean over a low fence only a few yards from the court. I and Joyce's coach and Knowles's coach and beautiful girlfriend are the only people really seriously standing and watching, though a lot of spectators on their way to more high-profile matches pass by and stop and watch a few points before moving on. The constant movements of civilians past the court aggrieves Knowles no end, and sometimes he shouts caustic things to people who've started walking away while a point is still in progress.

'Don't worry about it!' is one thing Knowles shouted at somebody who moved. 'We're only playing for money! We're only professionals! Don't give it a second thought!' Joyce, preparing to serve, will stare affectlessly straight ahead while he waits for Knowles to finish yelling, his expression sort of the one Vegas dealers have when a player they're cleaning out is rude or abusive: a patient and unjudging look whose expression is informed by the fact that they're being extremely well compensated for being patient and unjudging.

Joyce's coach describes Knowles as 'brilliant but kind of erratic,' and I think the coach is being kind, because Knowles seems to me to belong on a locked ward for people with serious emotional and personality disorders. He rants and throws and screams scatological curses I haven't heard since junior high. If one of his shots hits the top of the net cord and bounces back, Knowles will scream, 'I must be the luckiest guy in the world!'–his eyes protruding and mouth twisted. For me, he's an eerie echo of all the rich and well-instructed Midwest kids I used to play and beat because they'd be unable to eat the frustration when things didn't go their way. He seems not to notice that Joyce gets as many bad breaks and weird bounces as he, or that passing spectators are equally distracting to both players. I have a hard time believing that someone this off-the-wall could rise to a serious pro plateau, though it's true that when Knowles isn't letting his attention get scattered, he's a gorgeous player, with fluid strokes and marvelous touch and control over spin and pace. His read on Joyce is that Joyce is a slugger (which is true), and his tactic is to try to junk him up–change pace, vary spins, hit drop shots to draw Joyce in, deny Joyce pace or routine–and because he's Joyce's equal in firepower, the tactic is sound. Joyce wins the first set in a tiebreaker. But three times in the tiebreaker, Knowles yells at migratory spectators: 'Don't worry! It's only a tiebreaker in a professional match!' and is basically a wreck by the time the first set is over, and the second set is perfunctory, a formality that Joyce concludes as fast as possible before he hurries back to the players' tent to pack carbohydrates and find out whether he has to play his first round in the main draw later this same day.

43. He will lose badly to Michael Stich in the round of sixteen here, the same Stich Michael Joyce beat at the Lipton Championships in Key Biscayne four months before; in fact, Joyce himself will beat Courier in straight sets the next week, at the Infiniti Open in Los Angeles, in front of family and friends, for one of the biggest wins of his career.

44. Chang's mother is here–one of the most infamous of the dreaded Tennis Parents of the men's and women's tours, a woman who's reliably rumored to reach down her child's shorts in public to check his underwear–and her attendance (she's seated hierophantically in the player-guest boxes courtside) may have something to do with the staggering woe of Chang's mien and play. Thomas Enqvist ends up beating him badly in the quarterfinals on Friday. (Enqvist, by the way, looks eerily like a young Richard Chamberlain of The Towering Inferno , say, with that narrow, sort of rodentially patrician quality. The best thing about him is his girlfriend, who wears glasses and, when applauding a good point, sort of hops up and down in her seat with refreshing uncoolness.)

45. As Enqvist seems to be Edberg's ... Swedish tennis tends to be like monarchic succession: The Swedes tend to only have one really great player at a time, and this player is always male, and he almost always ends up best in the world for a while. This is one reason marketers and endorsement consultants are circling Enqvist like sharks all through the summer.

46. Nerves and choking are a huge issue in a precision-and-timing sport like tennis, and a 'bad head' washes more juniors and collegians out of the competitive life than any sort of deficit in talent or drive.

This story originally published in the July 1996 issue .

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String Theory: David Foster Wallace on Tennis review – the best writer on the game ever

In pieces that range from his own success as a junior player to the sport-changing ability of Roger Federer, Foster Wallace combined a nerd’s outlook with a novelist’s gift for exposition

D avid Foster Wallace was, in his own estimation, “a near great junior tennis player”. Between the ages of 12 and 15, he competed in tournaments all over the Midwest, at one point achieving a regional ranking of 17. He wrote about the experience in “Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley”, the first – and most challenging – of the five essays in this volume. “Derivative Sport” is unlike any other sporting memoir you’ll encounter: it combines a (somewhat sketchy) account of life on the junior circuit with voluminous divagations into climate, topography and geometry. Wallace’s aim appears to be to demonstrate that his success on the tennis court was largely accidental – less a reward for talent and perseverance than the unforeseeable outcome of freakish circumstance.

Because of where he grew up – the Illinois Corn Belt – Wallace felt at home “inside vectors, lines and lines athwart lines, grids”. A certain “weird proclivity for intuitive math” meant, moreover, that he found the “geometric thinking” required by tennis (all those rapid trigonometric calculations) straightforward. And most crucially, unlike practically every other player on the planet, he relished playing in the wind. (This, too, he links to his mathematical prowess: “I could … admit the differential complication of wind into my calculations.”) Being at ease with the wind gave Wallace a tremendous advantage, since he grew up in a pocket of Illinois known as Tornado Alley. The wind, he writes, “informed and deformed” life in his hometown, and did “massive damage to many central Illinois junior players”. Yet Wallace was able to cultivate a “robotic detachment” from his environment, and so spent his youth “beating up on” more naturally gifted players. Facing him – especially in a howling gale – must have been a nightmare.

But Wallace’s success was necessarily shortlived. As he got older and better, he started competing in more prestigious tournaments. At such events (“into which my rural excellence was an easement”), he encountered conditions less favourable to his game. As he puts it: “Once I hit a certain level of tournament facilities, I was disabled because I was unable to accommodate the absence of disabilities to accommodate.” And so his career flatlined. Players he’d once outwitted now out-bludgeoned him. At Amherst, the small east-coast college he started attending in 1980, he barely made the team.

Though Wallace claims that the decline of his tennis fortunes provided him with his first taste of “true adult sadness”, one senses, reading the essay, that he wasn’t too cut up about it. The truth – which he all too obviously grasps – is that he was constitutionally unsuited to life as an athlete. There was too much else going on in his overdeveloped brain. Yet exactly what remains unknowable. “Derivative Sport”, a piece about sneakily achieved athletic success, is itself an artfully sneaky (and entirely captivating) piece of writing. Under the guise of being modest, Wallace is actually being slyly boastful (I alone was clever enough to capitalise on my environment), while also revealing very little of himself. What the essay does make abundantly clear, though, is that tennis, at least as a sport to play, couldn’t bear the weight of Wallace’s over-intellectualising tendencies. He may, for a while, have felt at home within lines and grids; but when he got older, they stopped being able to contain him.

And so Wallace quit tennis. But he never turned his back on the sport. For the remainder of his life, it continued to fascinate him – and he returned to it regularly in writing. Infinite Jest , his 1996 magnum opus, is set partly in a tennis academy, and deals with the life – does this sound familiar? – of a preternaturally intelligent tennis prodigy. The sport, moreover, inspired some of his finest non-fiction: most famously his 2006 piece about Roger Federer , which would become (along with “Consider the Lobster” and “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” ) one of his best-known essays; but also a handful of earlier pieces, written for various US magazines. Now, for the first time, these have been gathered in a single volume, with an elegant introduction by John Jeremiah Sullivan.

Read together, these pieces demonstrate a few things. One is that Wallace’s grasp of tennis was truly prodigious. The analytical powers that must have ended up hindering him as a player made him a peerless observer of the sport. He has often been described as the best tennis writer of all time, and these essays don’t disabuse that notion. Wallace is interested in – and understands – every aspect of the game, from its strategic complications and technical evolution through to sponsorship deals and methods of hydration. In itself, of course, such knowledge isn’t exceptional. But where Wallace stands apart is that he is never boring with it. One of the marvels of his writing is the way it combines a nerd’s outlook with a novelist’s gift for exposition. And so when you read, say, the third essay in this book – a 12,000-word screed on the long-forgotten American journeyman Michael Joyce – you don’t begrudge the need to break off from the narrative to take in a half-page footnote on the politics of players’ appearance fees.

Something else about tennis clearly attracted Wallace: the opportunity it gave him to ruminate on excellence. His interest in this topic was by no means impersonal: his life, after all, was devoted to its pursuit. Four of the five essays here are about what it means to be great – or nearly great – on a tennis court. (The fifth, “Democracy and Commerce at the US Open”, avoids the subject, and is to my mind the only dud in the pack.) Wallace approaches greatness from a variety of angles. “How Tracey Austin Broke My Heart”, a review of the American player’s 1992 memoir Beyond Center Court , explores its psychology. Why, Wallace wants to know, are top athletes so uniformly unenlightening about their achievements, when they are the only people who actually know what it feels like to be so mind-bogglingly good? Wallace answers his own question (and lets Austin et al off the hook) by introducing a typically ingenious paradox: it “may well be”, he says, that only those who aren’t divinely gifted as athletes (ie spectators) are capable of seeing and articulating sporting genius, while those who actually “receive and act out the gift” must necessarily be “blind and dumb about it – and not because blindness and dumbness are the price of the gift, but because they are its essence”.

In his essay on Michael Joyce (“as of this day the 79th best tennis player on planet Earth”), Wallace considers the workaday life of someone who, though outstanding at what he does, will never be a household name. The essay is a lovely, lolling thing, circling around its subject without reaching any firm conclusions, but allowing Wallace to indulge his omnivorous interest in the sport. Readers (like me) who come to it after the Federer essay might find some of its arguments – particularly those that deal with the development of the “power-baseline game” – familiar, but this doesn’t matter: it’s a pleasure to encounter them in their earlier incarnations. The Federer essay, by contrast, is a much more urgent piece of writing, and that’s because, this time, Wallace’s arguments do sharpen to a point: the essay ends with the suggestion that Federer has, “literally and figuratively, re-embodied men’s tennis” – in other words, has shown that the sport hadn’t reached its “evolutionary endpoint”. I don’t think it’s fanciful to imagine that, in suggesting this, Wallace was also thinking of his own writing, and his need to find a way out of the creative impasse that trying to complete his final novel, The Pale King , had produced. The sad thing is that he never did find a way out. Within two years of writing the essay, he was dead.

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8 David Foster Wallace Essays You Can Read Online

If you've talked to me for more than five minutes, you probably know that I'm a huge fan of author and essayist David Foster Wallace . In my opinion, he's one of the most fascinating writers and thinkers that has ever lived, and he possessed an almost supernatural ability to articulate the human experience.

Listen, you don't have to be a pretentious white dude to fall for DFW. I know that stigma is out there, but it's just not true. David Foster Wallace's writing will appeal to anyone who likes to think deeply about the human experience. He really likes to dig into the meat of a moment — from describing state fair roller coaster rides to examining the mind of a detoxing addict. His explorations of the human consciousness are incredibly astute, and I've always felt as thought DFW was actually mapping out my own consciousness.

Contrary to what some may think, the way to become a DFW fan is not to immediately read Infinite Jest . I love Infinite Jest. It's one of my favorite books of all-time. But it is also over 1,000 pages long and extremely difficult to read. It took me seven months to read it for the first time. That's a lot to ask of yourself as a reader.

My recommendation is to start with David Foster Wallace's essays . They are pure gold. I discovered DFW when I was in college, and I would spend hours skiving off my homework to read anything I could get my hands on. Most of what I read I got for free on the Internet.

So, here's your guide to David Foster Wallace on the web. Once you've blown through these, pick up a copy of Consider the Lobster or A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again .

1. "This is Water" Commencement Speech

Technically this is a speech, but it will seriously revolutionize the way you think about the world and how you interact with it. You can listen to Wallace deliver it at Kenyon College , or you can read this transcript . Or, hey, do both.

2. "Consider the Lobster"

This is a classic. When he goes to the Maine Lobster Festival to do a report for Gourmet , DFW ends up taking his readers along for a deep, cerebral ride. Asking questions like "Do lobsters feel pain?" Wallace turns the whole celebration into a profound breakdown on the meaning of consciousness. (Don't forget to read the footnotes!)

2. "Ticket to the Fair"

Another episode of Wallace turning journalism into something more. Harper 's sent DFW to report on the state fair, and he emerged with this masterpiece. The Harper's subtitle says it all: "Wherein our reporter gorges himself on corn dogs, gapes at terrifying rides, savors the odor of pigs, exchanges unpleasantries with tattooed carnies, and admires the loveliness of cows."

3. "Federer as Religious Experience"

DFW was obviously obsessed with tennis, but you don't have to like or know anything about the sport to be drawn in by his writing. In this essay, originally published in the sports section of The New York Times , Wallace delivers a profile on Roger Federer that soon turns into a discussion of beauty with regard to athleticism. It's hypnotizing to read.

4. "Shipping Out: On the (nearly lethal) comforts of a luxury cruise"

Later published as "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" in the collection of the same name, this essay is the result of Harper's sending Wallace on a luxury cruise. Wallace describes how the cruise sends him into a depressive spiral, detailing the oddities that make up the strange atmosphere of an environment designed for ultimate "fun."

5. "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction"

This is definitely in the running for my favorite DFW essay. (It's so hard to choose.) Fiction writers! Television! Voyeurism! Loneliness! Basically everything I love comes together in this piece as Wallace dives into a deep exploration of how humans find ways to look at each other. Though it's a little long, it's endlessly fascinating.

6. "String Theory"

"You are invited to try to imagine what it would be like to be among the hundred best in the world at something. At anything. I have tried to imagine; it's hard."

Originally published in Esquire , this article takes you deep into the intricate world of professional tennis. Wallace uses tennis (and specifically tennis player Michael Joyce) as a vehicle to explore the ideas of success, identity, and what it means to be a professional athlete.

7. "9/11: The View from the Midwest"

Written in the days following 9/11, this article details DFW and his community's struggle to come to terms with the attack.

8. "Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the Wars Over Usage "

If you're a language nerd like me, you'll really dig this one. A self-proclaimed "snoot" about grammar, Wallace dives into the world of dictionaries, exploring all of the implications of how language is used, how we understand and define grammar, and how the "Democratic Spirit" fits into the tumultuous realms of English.

Images: cocoparisienne /Pixabay; werner22brigette /Pixabay; StartupStockPhotos /Pixabay; PublicDomainPIctures /Pixabay

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Book review: david foster wallace's string theory, watch: carlos alcaraz laughs off april fool’s prank courtesy of babolat, watch: zizou bergs confuses clay swing with new physio clay sniteman in houston, aryna sabalenka returns to social media to thank fans for support after death of ex-boyfriend konstantin koltsov, 'i think i deserve five stars': caroline wozniacki recounts excellent charleston adventure with daria kasatkina, madison keys and charleston tournament team up to raise $75,000 for her charitable foundation, holger rune improves flexibility during annual monte carlo practice with novak djokovic, jannik sinner surpasses 20 million dollars in career prize money after winning miami open, is a new passion for golf the key to danielle collins' sizzling swan song, david beckham meets andre agassi in 'bucket list moment' during miami open, book review: david foster wallace's string theory.

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String theory : David Foster Wallace on tennis

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David Foster Wallace On Tennis: 'Derivative Sport In Tornado Alley'

The late David Foster Wallace wrote about tennis with the authority of an insider (he was a junior tennis player and lifelong fan), the style of a literary virtuoso and the disarming admiration of an irrepressible fan. String Theory: David Foster Wallace on Tennis gathers all five of his famous essays on tennis, including masterful profiles of Roger Federer, Michael Joyce and Tracy Austin, pieces that have been hailed by sportswriters and literary critics alike as some of the greatest and most innovative magazine writing in recent memory. Here is an excerpt of a story that was first published in 1991:

A tennis court, 78' × 27', looks, from above, with its slender rectangles of doubles alleys flanking its whole length, like a cardboard carton with flaps folded back. The net, 3.5 feet high at the posts, divides the court widthwise in half; the service lines divide each half again into backcourt and fore-. In the two forecourts, lines that run from the base of the net's center to the service lines divide them into 21' × 13.5' service boxes. The sharply precise divisions and boundaries, together with the fact that -- wind and your more exotic-type spins aside -- balls can be made to travel in straight lines only, make textbook tennis plane geometry. It is billiards with balls that won't hold still. It is chess on the run. It is to artillery and airstrikes what football is to infantry and attrition.

I liked the sharp intercourse of straight lines more than the other kids I grew up with. I think this is because they were natives, whereas I was an infantile transplant from Ithaca, where my dad had Ph.D.'d. So I'd known, even horizontally and semiconsciously as a baby, something different, the tall hills and serpentine one-ways of upstate NY. I'm pretty sure I kept the amorphous mush of curves and swells as a contrasting backlight somewhere down in the lizardy part of my brain, because the Philo children I fought and played with, kids who knew and had known nothing else, saw nothing stark or new-worldish in the township's planar layout, prized nothing crisp. (Except why do I think it significant that so many of them wound up in the military, performing smart right-faces in razor-creased dress blues?)

Acceptance is its own verve, and it takes imagination for a player to like wind, and I liked wind; or rather I at least felt the wind had some basic right to be there, and found it sort of interesting, and was willing to expand my logistical territory to countenace the devastating effect a 15- to 30-mph stutter-breeze swirling southwest to east would have on my best calculations as to how ambitiously to respond to Joe Perfecthair's topspin drive into my backhand corner.

-- Excerpted by permission from String Theory: David Foster Wallace on Tennis . Volume compilation copyright (c) 2016 by Literary Classics of the United States, Inc. Published by The Library Of America . All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. Available for purchase from the publisher , Amazon and Barnes & Noble .

Books , David Foster Wallace , Geometry , Tennis

Jeffrey Meyers

Grace under pressure: david foster wallace on tennis.

String Theory by David Foster Wallace , New American Library, 2016, pp.158, £16.99 (hardback) 

Many writers have played tennis: Nabokov, Frost, Pound, Hemingway, Theodore Roethke, Randall Jarrell, even Solzhenitsyn in Vermont and Martin Amis today. Like poetry, tennis has strict rules and requires technical skill. It is individual yet social, aesthetically pleasing, intellectual, at times erotic. Despite its formal rituals and elegant traditions, players can be egoistic, aggressive, even violent, eager for victory and angry in defeat.

String Theory (2016), which puns on David Foster Wallace’s talent in tennis and expertise in math, reprints the novelist’s five long articles on the sport, written from 1991 to 2006. The handsome green cover—with a rectangular frame, silver racket and seamed yellow ball—suggests a game on a grass court. Literary, not journalistic, Wallace omits mind-numbing statistics and “up-close and personal” details about the players’ friends and girls, family and children, coaches and trainers, agents and clothing, cheering section and entourage, celebrity and adulation. Wallace concentrates on the competition and analyzes the physical and psychological qualities needed to excel. His intelligence, style, humor, wit and sly sexual jests make him the best-ever writer on tennis.

“Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley”, a memoir of his Midwestern boyhood, describes himself as the young competitor who became the shrewd narrator of the dynamics and sensations of the game. The teenage Wallace had the speed of a swallow, the grace of a boy. He maintained, with some exaggeration, that “between the ages of twelve and fifteen I was a near-great junior tennis player,” ranked 17th in the Midwest. In his flat prairie Illinois homeland, the courts were deformed by “breezes and gusts and thermals and downdrafts.” Nets, like sexual erections, stood out parallel to the ground and hard-hit balls made sharp right turns and flew onto the next court.

But Wallace was shrewd about “the angles and alleys of serious tennis,” which required geometric thinking. He says “I could play just forever, sending back moonballs baroque with spin . . . I could hit curves way out into cross-breezes that’d drop the ball just fair; I had a special wind-serve that had so much spin the ball turned oval in the air and curved left to right.” His strategy, though not thrilling, was effective: “I didn’t hit the ball all that hard, but I rarely made unforced errors, and I was fast, and my general approach was simply to keep hitting the ball back to the opponent until the kid screwed up.” His biographer D. T. Max writes that he “found that calculating angles and adjusting for wind velocity gave him an advantage over other players.” But his intellectual “habit of rationalizing every hit had its downside; his teammates played more by instinct and so were faster.”

In his climactic account of frequent homegrown tornadoes, Wallace dramatically claims that he was once blown over the net, “my feet not once touching the ground over fifty-odd feet.” Smashed against a distant fence, he got deep quadrangular lines impressed on his face, torso and legs that made him look like a pressed waffle. But he felt free to invent this exciting story, which never actually took place.

In “Tracy Austin Broke My Heart”, Wallace wonders why this child prodigy (and her ghostwriter) could not produce an interesting autobiography. Austin had an amazing career and disastrous life. She was on the cover of World Tennis at age four, won her first pro tournament at fourteen and captured the U.S. Open at sixteen. He compares this achievement to “someone who was ineligible for a DMV learner’s permit winning the Indianapolis 500.” The Shirley Temple of the court, “she was the first real child star in women’s tennis, and in the late ’70s she was prodigious, beautiful and inspiring.” Alluding to Hamlet’s guilty mother and to Sigmund Freud’s theories, Wallace notes that Austin insists, with unconvincing “Gertrudian fervor,” that her mother did not force her into tennis and uses “Viennese repression” to exonerate her.

Wallace states that Austin carefully avoids the dark side of the game and that “ignorance of her sport’s grittier realities”—payments to players to appear in tournaments, corrupt linesmen biased to favorites, bribes given to throw a match—“seems literally incredible.” But she probably knew about these crimes and kept silent to maintain her media manners and virginal image. By contrast, Nastase, McEnroe and Connors became famous for their profanity and tantrums.

Despite her superb physical coordination, Austin was uncommonly prone to freak accidents: “coaches who fall on her while ice-skating and break her ankle, psychotic chiropractors who pull her spine out of alignment, waiters who splash her with scalding water.” Though Wallace doesn’t speculate on the reasons for these disasters, they may have been forms of guilt-ridden self-punishment for her premature success and early failure. After these crippling events, and while trying to make a comeback, she was on the way to the U.S. Open when a speeding van drove through a red light, shattered her leg and nearly killed her. In a classically tragic trajectory, her athletic life was compressed from sixteen to twenty-one when her career, both literally and figuratively, crashed.

Austin failed to deliver the fully realized memoir that Wallace hoped to read. He wanted her book to be perceptive and profound, to penetrate the mystery of her genius. Her history is fascinating, her account dead. Slavishly following the trite formula of the sports biography—which editors elicit, ghostwriters glorify and readers relish—Austin serves up a string of robotic banalities and dead clichés. After winning the final against Chris Evert, her reaction was: “I immediately knew what I had done, which was win the U.S. Open, and I was thrilled.” She also provides a typically uplifting comment, “Tennis took me like a magic carpet to all kinds of places and all kinds of people.” A celebrity herself, she was also thrilled by the presence of other celebrities. Wallace regrets that “the book is inanimate because it communicates no real feeling and so gives us no sense of a conscious person.”

Many top athletes, who often skip college and turn pro right after high school, are both uneducated and inarticulate. They painfully reveal this every time they’re interviewed on television after a big win and offer something like, “Well, I was real happy and also pleased.” Wallace finds it hard “to reconcile the vapidity of Austin’s narrative mind with the extraordinary mental powers that are required by world-class tennis . . . [playing] with huge sums of money at stake and enormous crowds of people watching her.” But agility and power, intense focus and concentration, grace under pressure, even under assault, are very different from intellectual acuity. Wallace paradoxically concludes that “blindness and dumbness are the price of the gift because they are its essence.” In his later essay on Michael Joyce, he returns to this theory and tries to imagine “what impoverishments in one’s mental life would allow people actually to think in the simplistic way great athletes seem to think.” Like tennis pros, the technically proficient astronauts could not describe their experience in space. Only Norman Mailer’s A Fire on the Moon could do this.

In “Michael Joyce’s Professional Artistry” Wallace describes his feelings when watching the untelevised realities of the Canadian Open in July 1995. With idiosyncratic medical and sexual humor, he mentions the jagged “EKG skyline of downtown Montreal” and the huge phallic photo of the dome of ice cream “unabashedly glansular.” Riffing on national stereotypes, he comically describes the foreign players: spidery French guys with gelled hair, lugubrious Germans, bored-looking Italians, blank-eyed Swedes and pockmarked Colombians. The Czech Petr Korda has “the face of—eerily, uncannily —a fresh-hatched chicken.” Wallace scrutinizes the competitors with the eye of a trained physiognomist, noting that most have similar builds: “big muscular legs, shallow chests, skinny necks, and one normal-sized arm and one monstrously huge hypertrophic arm.”

Their weird names, which commentators find hard to pronounce, match their distorted bodies: Martin Sinner and Martin Zumpft, Udo Riglewski and Slava Dosedel, the oblivious Guy Forget and perverse Cyril Suk. Michael Chang, as if depilated, has totally hairless legs while Pete Sampras boasts unbelievably hairy appendages. Like Scandinavians given unfair advantage when competing for the Nobel Prize, Canadians, especially Québecois, are blessed in Montreal as “uniquely deserving,” vault over higher ranked players and squeeze into the qualifying rounds.

Michael Joyce, at 5’ 11” and 165 pounds, looks compact and stocky: “He is fair-skinned and has reddish hair and the kind of patchy, vaguely pubic goatee of somebody who isn’t quite able yet to grow real facial hair.” He was the top-ranked junior in America, is currently rated the 79th best player on earth and is placed by Wallace “on the cusp between the major leagues and AAA ball.” Wallace rapturously defines tennis as the most beautiful and demanding kind of art: “It requires body control, hand-eye coordination, quickness, flat-out speed, endurance, and that strange mix of caution and abandon we call courage.” When Joyce plays a weak Canadian opponent, Wallace describes the match as a feral fight, “as carnage of a particular high-level sort; it’s like watching an extremely large and powerful predator get torn to pieces by an even larger and more powerful predator.”

Like most players, Joyce does not have—cannot afford to have—any interests outside of tennis except big-budget movies and popular novels sold in airports. “He wants to be the best,” Wallace concludes, “to have his name known, to hold professional trophies over his head as he patiently turns in all four directions for the media.” Though famous, he submits to manipulation. But Joyce failed to realize his high expectations. He had greater success as the coach of the beautiful Russian Maria Sharapova who, under his aegis, won three Grand Slams and reached #1 in the world.

“Democracy and Commerce at the U.S. Open” is a humorous and satiric overkill piece about sponsorial greed. Wallace opens with the match between Pete Sampras and Mark Philippousis. Since the American and Australian are both of Greek descent, he calls their game the post-modern Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta. He states, “Philippousis is oligarchic: he has a will and seeks to impose it. Sampras is more democratic, i.e. more chaotic but also more human.” Mark likes to dance in place between points. Pete, “a kind of angry eel getting ready to writhe,” sweats through his shorts “in an embarrassing way that suggests incontinence.” Neither one can play with full-bore intensity for five sets. Wallace doesn’t actually describe Sampras’ victory—in the third round he lost the first set and won the next three—but cunningly shifts the focus from the competition to the disastrous effects of commerce.

The rules of the courts are strict, the explosion of capitalism rampant. Wallace calls modern tennis a multinational sport, “a marketing subdivision of very large corporations.” They officially sponsor not only the whole tournament, but also each individual event. In addition to the plague of advertising, the viral concession stands are designed to separate the spectators from their cash. During, as well as between, the matches people frantically buy things instead of watching the game. Crowds, with stylish women dressed to suggest how they’d look when naked, swarm madly around the stadium like mobs at the fall of Saigon. The stores empty as fast as coastal depots during hurricane warnings. Since tournament tickets and all the widely publicized products are available only to wealthy consumers, “Democracy” in his title is ironic.

All this huckstering is worlds apart from the atmosphere surrounding the tennis tournaments in the early 1950s, when I grew up in Forest Hills and walked to the U.S. Open at the West Side Tennis Club. Almost all the players were American, English and Australian. There were grass courts and wooden rackets, white clothes and white balls. There was no noise or cheering, no ads or television, no lucrative endorsements or huge prizes. Everyone behaved with polite reserve and good manners. When one player got the benefit of an unfair call, he didn’t swing at the next shot and evened up the score. In 1973, at his tennis club in southern Spain, Lew Hoad told me that when he won the Australian, French and British Grand Slams as an amateur in 1956 he earned only a few thousand dollars.

Wallace shifts from satire to reverence in his last essay, “Federer Both Flesh and Not.” He justifies the value of his eye-witness account by emphasizing the difference between watching television and live tennis, which he compares to video porn and real love. He dislikes the way most people write about tennis in terms of war: “elimination vs. advance, hierarchy of rank and standing, obsessive stats and technical analysis, tribal and/or nationalist fervor, uniforms, mass noise, banners, chest-thumping, face-painting.” Instead, he penetrates to the essence of the sport by describing the beauty and grace of the body, exemplified by Federer.

Wallace had mentioned, without explaining why, that “he loathes Agassi with a passion.” He now begins by recalling that Federer had defeated Agassi in the 2005 U.S. Open final and that Nadal “beat the absolute shit out of Agassi” at Wimbledon before facing Federer in the English finals in 2006. Contrasting the Spaniard and the Swiss, Wallace notes “the passionate machismo of southern Europe versus the intricate clinical artistry of the north. Cleaver and scalpel,” and adds the Nietzschean antithesis of Dionysus and Apollo. Unlike most players, Federer—Wallace’s beau idéal —travels with his girlfriend and handles his own business affairs. He is stoical, mentally tough and a good sportsman as well as decent, thoughtful and charitable.  

Explaining how Federer beat Nadal, Wallace says that he exemplifies the superior strength and conditioning, the pace, topspin and aggressive angles of the power-baseline game. His rapid reactions, astonishing movements and range of reflexes create what Wallace calls the Federer Moments that account for his success: “The metaphysical explanation is that Roger Federer is one of those rare, preternatural athletes who appear to be exempt, at least in part, from certain physical laws.” He is both flesh and spirit—feathery, as his German surname implies. Wallace cannot describe the whole match, but suggests Federer’s victory with one quintessential shot: “Federer steps to this ball and now hits a totally different crosscourt backhand, this one much shorter and sharper-angled, an angle no one would anticipate, and so heavy and blurred with topspin that it lands shallow and just inside the sideline and takes off hard after the bounce, and Nadal can’t move in to cut it off and can’t get to it laterally along the baseline, because of all the angle and topspin—end of point. It’s a spectacular winner, a Federer Moment.”

Professionals embody an ideal perfection that serious players can strive for but can never achieve. Wallace, who finds them compelling, writes that top athletes, hybrids of animals and angels, carve out “exemptions from physical laws . . . and are profundity in motion. They enable abstractions like power and grace and control to become not only incarnate but also televisable.”

– Words by Jeffrey Meyers . String Theory by David Foster Wallace is available to buy here .

To discover more content exclusive to our print and digital editions,  subscribe here  to receive a copy of The London Magazine to your door every two months, while also enjoying full access to our extensive digital archive of essays, literary journalism, fiction and poetry. 

Jeffrey Meyers, FRSL, has had thirty-three books translated into fourteen languages, published on six continents. He’s recently published Robert Lowell in Love and The Mystery of the Real: Correspondence with Alex Colville in 2016, Resurrections: Authors, Heroes—and a Spy in 2018.

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The New York Times

Straight sets | reading list: ‘the string theory’ by david foster wallace, reading list: ‘the string theory’ by david foster wallace.

Watching Maria Sharapova’s close straight-set win over the qualifier Victoriya Kutuzova on the Tennis Channel Monday night, I was especially interested in seeing how her new, postoperation service motion looked. It’s coming along, I think, and should pick up pace and accuracy as she competes through the summer. She is a welcome addition to the mix of players who could vie for the majors. At the French Open, she willed herself past Nadia Petrova, and I was impressed by her love of the big moments in a match, by the sheer joy with which Sharapova competes.

At several points in the Kutuzova match, the camera turned to her coach, the former tour veteran Michael Joyce. He has been working with Sharapova for several years now and has done such a solid job that Sharapova’s father, Yuri, is no longer at every match. Joyce’s calm, somewhat uninterested, demeanor is a marked change from Yuri’s intensity. At one point, the British announcers commented on Joyce’s appearance: “He looks like a footballer!” Or an Irish rugby player, I thought to myself, with his thinning red hair and features that would be right at home in Dublin or Galway. And then I remembered the article written on Joyce, 13 long summers ago, when Joyce was in his playing prime.

“ The String Theory ,” published in Esquire in 1996, is the single best essay I’ve ever read on tennis. I reread it last night after the Sharapova match. It was written by David Foster Wallace, one of the most influential writers of his generation, who committed suicide last September. The day after Federer won at Roland Garros, Straight Sets linked to Wallace’s sublime article that appeared in Play magazine of The New York Times in 2006, “ Federer as Religious Experience .” I reread that essay, too, both grateful that such a brilliant, hilarious and insightful writer paid homage to tennis, but also sad that Wallace is gone.

The writer’s death hit Joyce pretty hard. While recuperating from surgery for a blood clot in his leg, Joyce received a text message at 3 a.m. from a friend informing him of Wallace’s suicide. Although the two had not stayed in touch over the years, their fates were intertwined because of the immense popularity of “The String Theory” among serious tennis fans.

In an interview with Steve Pratt, published in Tennis Week last September, Joyce discussed his own ambivalent reaction to the essay :

“To be honest I never even liked the article much just for the simple fact that I could never really understand it. When somebody is talking about you in a vocabulary that you really don’t understand it’s hard to. … I don’t know. I never really liked it or disliked it. I guess I just never understood why so many people liked it. I’ve had people to this day, at every tournament I’m at, come up to me and comment on that article at least two or three times in a week wherever I am in the world. They come up and say that is the greatest tennis article they’ve ever read.”

The essay covers a lot of ground, from what qualifying is like to how players experience life on the tour. Wallace uses Joyce as a foil to explain the levels of the game. We learn why Joyce is superior to players ranked beneath him and why. But Wallace also shows us what separates his subject from, say, Andre Agassi, who was dominating the North American hard-court circuit that summer.

The observations on tennis are knowledgeable, insightful and conveyed with a profound appreciation for the sport. More than anything, “The String Theory” is a paean to the game. Wallace said it best:

“I submit that tennis is the most beautiful sport there is and also the most demanding. It requires body control, hand-eye coordination, quickness, flat-out speed, endurance, and that weird mix of caution and abandon we call courage. It also requires smarts. Just one single shot in one exchange in one point of a high-level match is a nightmare of mechanical variables. Given a net that’s three feet high (at the center) and two players in (unrealistically) fixed positions, the efficacy of one single shot is determined by its angle, depth, pace, and spin. And each of these determinants is itself determined by still other variables — i.e., a shot’s depth is determined by the height at which the ball passes over the net combined with some integrated function of pace and spin, with the ball’s height over the net itself determined by the player’s body position, grip on the racket, height of backswing and angle of racket face, as well as the 3-D coordinates through which the racket face moves during that interval in which the ball is actually on the strings. The tree of variables and determinants branches out and out, on and on, and then on much further when the opponent’s own position and predilections and the ballistic features of the ball he’s sent you to hit are factored in. No silicon-based RAM yet existent could compute the expansion of variables for even a single exchange; smoke would come out of the mainframe. The sort of thinking involved is the sort that can be done only by a living and highly conscious entity, and then it can really be done only unconsciously, i.e., by fusing talent with repetition to such an extent that the variables are combined and controlled without conscious thought. In other words, serious tennis is a kind of art.”

Wallace played tennis his first two years at Amherst, then quit to devote himself to his studies. He approached tennis as an observer who played at a high enough level to understand the game in a perceptive way. Deeply modest, Wallace would nevertheless interject his own game and tennis background to make a point, usually a funny, self-deprecating one. An earlier autobiographical essay, “ Tennis, Trigonometry, Tornadoes ” was published in Harper’s in the December 1991 issue. It’s where I first read him, and it is a wonderful memoir for anyone who played junior tennis and lived to tell about it.

But the most extended tennis writing in Wallace’s career comes in his tour de force novel, “ Infinite Jest .” Partly set at a highly dysfunctional tennis academy, the novel contains several scenes about tennis and tennis playing. He even names a character after the American player, Kate Gompert. It is a howlingly funny book, but also a sad one. It took me months to finish (it’s more than 900 pages) but it contains moments of virtuosity and transcendence that have stayed with me.

Comments are no longer being accepted.

Let me be the first to say it out loud: David Foster Wallace’s ode to Federer was vomit-inducing fanboy froth at its worst. I’m not surprised the pro-Federer/anti-Nadal NYT bloggers love it so much and call it as “great art”. Please.

There are plenty of other players who play wonderful tennis out there, but unfortunately they all make Federer look better than he really is because they lack Nadal’s testicular fortitude.

Rafael Nadal’s ferocious spirit is sorely missed. Wimbledon needs him. Tennis needs him. Come back soon, Rafa!

Um, Annie, so your worship of Nadal’s “testicular fortitude” is not vomit-inducing fangirl froth at its worst.?! Pot, meet kettle ;-) Sounds like you’re one of those “enamored and effusive” Vamos Brigade worshippers so hilariously described in the recent feature on Rafa?! Come back soon, puhleeeeeze, Rafa, your legion of enamored and effusive female worshippers NEED you…

wow. that was a short match.

So sorry, Annie. Hello, Kettle? Pot here… You’re BLAAAACK. News flash: there is nothing more vomit-inducing than fangirl lust for a rude and posturing muscleboy tennis star they will never actually meet….

Thanks for linking to “the sting theory”. It one of the best article on tennis i have ever read . This article along with “Federer as religious experience” must be the best sports article i have ever read. Thanks again for linking to David’s article . Its very sad to know that David committed suicide last year. May his soul rest in peace.

Holy cow this is the best comment thread I have ever read.

Rhymey too.

But seriously folks…

DFW wrote some great stuff but in the end will be most studied as a symptom of how need for approval leads to disappointment to the point of depression. I see some of the antics of some of the professional tennis players being similar to the type of writer ….oh what the heck. DOES ANYONE ELSE SEE A PATTERN HERE? Fawning Fannery is disgusting. Tossing rackets, insulting line judges (thx to Johnie Mac’s ‘your the scum of the earth ‘ rant). Whether tennis or literature. I hope you write and play as much as you read and watch. It is better for the soul, better for our race.

Figure out a way to raise a couple of well adjusted kids, teach them to play sports, read and write well, and don’t be suckers for false idols.

The Sports-Tainment industry needs to be taken down a notch or two. And so do narcissistic English professors.

I hope you find self fulfillment.

Oh yeah, Clear Window’s is my favorite.

I thoroughly enjoyed “Infinite Jest” and most other works by DFW I’ve read. I also began to fall in love with tennis about the time I discovered DFW’s writing. I think the sport is far richer with his writing; it’s a shame a small post describing a writer who obviously loved tennis has to be turned into some kind of weird version of a Champions League match, without the courtesy and respect between dueling fans.

Yuck , you people are lame.

Wallace is a great writer, I suggest that your read an article he wrote titled “Consider the Lobster”.

I’m with you, masayaNYC, and thanks, Geoff – found DFW long after I found tennis, and was/am blown away by how he describes it. I swing back and forth for being grateful he wrote about it at all, and saddened that he isn’t around any longer to enjoy it and delight us.

Um, what is with all these crazy Fed and Rafa fans? The players get along, why can’t you all?

Thanks for the links. I’ve read the “trigonometry” piece under the title “Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley.” I actually started “Infinite Jest” last month, though not for the group read.

“that weird mix of caution and abandon we call courage”

There’s a character on the staff of the halfway house who has “turned his life over to the care of clichés: One day at a time. Easy does it. First things first. Courage is fear that has said its prayers…”

Track and field broadcaster Larry Rawson used to have lots of these little gems like “Experience is a name we give our mistakes” and “Growth is the only evidence of improvement in our lives.” I take it that athletes live by these little sayings :)

The reference to November in the first paragraph of “Infinite Jest”:

“This is a cold room in University Administration…double-windowed against the November heat, insulated from Administrative sounds by the reception area outside…”

Seems like it might be an allusion to the first paragraph of Chapter 1 of “Moby-Dick”:

“Whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul…–then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.”

What say you?

PS I don’t much about tennis but after last month’s French Open I decided to read Jon Wertheim’s “Venus Envy,” which seemed like a pretty good book to me. What David wrote about sports biographies doesn’t really apply of course.

Great tennis blog by the way.

The Wallace tennis article was wonderful, both from a literary aspect and with respect to Wallace’s appreciation of the sport. Detractors of the article are looking for something to whine about. They remind me of my ex-wife.

There’s lots more excellent writing on tennis in the 1995 anthology “Tennis and the Meaning of Life,” edited by Jay Jennings.

DFW fans also shouldn’t miss the essay “How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart,” which can be found in Consider the Lobster.

I agree that wimbledon is so boring without the exuberant defending champion Rafael Nadal. btw Federer looks like a ridiculous poof in that pretentious getup.

Don’t forget Levels of the Game, John McPhee’s masterly account of the confrontation between Arthur Ashe and Clark Graebner.

Joanne, I’m a Rafa fan too, but obviously not in your fanatic league. I notice that you, along with a couple of others, never miss an opportunity to say something venemous about Federer, as if the guy has personally hurt you. It’s weird the way some fans behave, especially when the players are so amiable together.

It’s a tragedy what happened to DFW. A great loss personally, and to literature. He probably could have written something very funny and discerning about fanatical fans.

Coach, The perfect outlet for your brilliance both on and off the court!!! You’d love to hear that a friend of mine dedicated a play to DFW that’s very likely to be produced here in ATL. Best blog ever!!! Babel

Geoff-As you know the passing of DFW took on a strangely personal sense of loss for me. Reading you, writing about him, I find some solace as in a way I see you as one of the few people on planet Earth with the same knowledge of the game and gift for words to convey that knowledge meaningfully to others. More than a decade ago we ‘survived’ Infinite Jest together. Thanks for keeping the memory of DFW, and the kind of true passion for the game of tennis only someone of your (or his!) unique combination of abilities can offer. Best, Craig

I like this article, but ….

I think the best tennis appreciation I have ever read is a 2007 NYT Opinion page piece called Quantum Tennis, written by Verlyn Klinkenborg, a writer I have come to admire. Not quite the embellishment of DFW. But then it’s journalism—there’s that word count. Klinkenborg is versatile. There’s his book I want to get, The Rural Life, and just today I find he has written the text to a National Geographic article about a National Forest in Finland.

//www.nytimes.com/2007/09/08/opinion/08sat4.html?scp=1&sq=Quantum%20Tennis&st=cse

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By  Ben Leubner.

David Foster Wallace, String Theory: David Foster Wallace on Tennis (Library of America, 2016)

The five essays that comprise String Theory: David Foster Wallace on Tennis have all appeared in other books by Wallace: two in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again , one in Consider the Lobster , and two in the posthumously published Both Flesh and Not . Nevertheless, it’s a treat to have them all collected between two covers now, especially when the book in question is a well-designed, slim and handsome hardcover, styled in the green-and-white of a traditional grass or hard court tennis surface. The only unpublished material in the collection is a short introduction by John Jeremiah Sullivan that aptly summarizes Wallace’s junior career in and lifelong enjoyment of tennis, concluding with a black-and-white photograph of an eighteen-year-old Wallace and his high school tennis team, a bowl-headed Wallace grinning in the back row, hugging his racquet to his chest.

When Esquire originally ran Wallace’s essay on tennis pro Michael Joyce in 1996, it was titled “The String Theory,” a title which this new collection both borrows and improves upon by excising its definite article. Such an evocation of a branch of quantum physics in a book about tennis might seem unusual, but it is, of course, apt when the writer in question is David Foster Wallace. Wallace was always interested in what can be called the multidimensionality of tennis, and not just insofar as the game brings into play length, width, height, depth, and time, in addition to the laws of motion. There are psychological dimensions of the game to be considered, as well, along with others: economical dimensions, broadly aesthetic dimensions, even ethical dimensions, and so on. As often happens in his nonfiction, Wallace’s ostensible subject frequently serves as an excuse for, or rather a gateway to, any number of other considerations, some of which, on occasion, will temporarily hijack the essay in question, usurping its original topic. With tennis as the hub in this volume, spokes run out in several directions from essay to essay: to mathematics, to finance and commerce, to meteorology and geography, to celebrity culture and the ethos of entertainment, to Greek tragedy, to mysticism. It’s all in the game.

But Wallace’s true non-ostensible subject in these five essays would seem unsurprisingly to be, more often than not, writing – the game of tennis, that is, frequently serves as a metaphor for or simply evokes the art of writing in Wallace’s sports musings. One would expect something like this, perhaps, in his scathing and yet simultaneously sympathetic review of Tracy Austin’s ghostwritten autobiography, where his subject is already a book about tennis, but it’s there in the other four essays as well, an analogy usually cruising below the surface of their content, but one that occasionally surfaces for air. And this connection is made even more apparent in Infinite Jest , some of the tennis bits of which the editors at Library of America, who compiled String Theory, were wise to leave out, as it would have been just too messy and too violent a job to excerpt, abridge, and contextualize that particular novel.

Yet Infinite Jest is indeed about tennis in a very big way, and early on in the novel, which was published the same year as “The String Theory,” Wallace makes the connection between tennis and writing readily apparent, where this connection then goes on to inform the remaining thousand pages that the reader still has to trek through. The passage in question is a conversation over ice cream between tennis instructor Gerhardt Schtitt and the multi-handicapped moral center of the novel, Mario Incandenza, where Schtitt’s remarks to Mario on the aesthetics of tennis function simultaneously as commentary on the aesthetics of the novel itself. Schtitt, we’re told, understands on an intuitive level what James Incandenza, Mario’s physicist-turned-filmmaker father, understood at a theoretical level (deep breath):

that locating beauty and art and magic and improvement and keys to excellence and victory in the prolix flux of match play is not a fractal matter of reducing chaos to pattern . . . was a matter not of reduction at all, but – perversely – of expansion, the aleatory flutter of uncontrolled, metastatic growth…

This expansion and growth are, however, “beautiful because in foliating, contained , [a] diagnate infinity of infinities of choice and execution, mathematically uncontrolled but humanly contained .” There are any number of metafictional passages in Infinite Jest that seem to be about the novel itself, even providing “keys” to it, but few are more vital, I think, than this one and the remarks that immediately follow it. It’s easy to see the novel itself as a vast, expansive, perversely infoliating, contained system, an infinity between two covers, thus firmly establishing an analogy between the book itself and a tennis court. Both the book and the court are finite, bounded, delineated by lines; however, they are both also diagnate infinities, where the word “diagnate” would seem to imply, in the case of the court, the involvement of two players, and so in the case of the book the relationship between writer and reader. This is where the exponential in foliation occurs, in the relationship between two entities encountering each other in a given field, on either side of a divide.

Essentially, then, to read Infinite Jest is to play a kind of tennis with David Foster Wallace; it’s him against us, where unless we’re focused, poised, and really on our game, he’ll yank us around from the outset and torture us as Mario’s brother, Hal, does to his opponents – and as many who have tried to read Infinite Jest but failed to estimate it properly might attest, Wallace himself is perfectly capable of doing this, too. If we are ready, though, if we don’t underestimate our opponent, if our own strokes are practiced and we move about freely within the restrictions of the court, we might just play a good match against him. Plenty of people have said of Infinite Jest , “That book kicked my ass,” no doubt an apposite expression here. But a good reader can give the book a run for its money, though the point here, of course, isn’t who wins or loses, or whose statistics are better, but what Schtitt conceives as the “ not -order” of the match, the “places [within it] where things broke down, fragmented into beauty.”

What, the narrator-as-Mario wonders in relation to Schtitt’s earlier claims, are the boundaries of tennis “that contain and direct its infinite expansion inward, that make tennis like chess on the run, beautiful and infinitely dense?” The baselines and service lines, etc., avers Schtitt, aren’t the true boundaries; neither, even, is the player’s opponent. “The true opponent, the enfolding boundary,” he says, “is the player himself. Always and only the self out there, on court, to be met, fought, brought to the table to hammer out terms.” The person on the other side of the net is just “the partner in the dance,” “the excuse or occasion for meeting the self.” In which case to read Infinite Jest is now not so much to go up against Wallace himself; he’s just the partner in the dance, the necessary excuse or occasion for our going up against ourselves : that’s where the real competition is, where the real winning and losing occurs. The reader’s confrontation with the writer, with just a thin barrier between them, is first and foremost a self-confrontation. We baffle ourselves with our own limitations, even when we occasionally exceed or even momentarily transcend them. And what’s true for the reader in relation to the writer is also true for the writer in relation to the reader.     Both reading and writing are forms of self-confrontation enabled by the occasion of meeting with a second party. And Wallace, it seems, both won and lost this confrontation with himself, as perhaps we all do, though Wallace both won and lost big.

In the essay on Michael Joyce, Wallace addresses his reader: “You are invited to try to imagine what it would be like to be among the hundred best in the world at something. At anything. I have tried to imagine; it’s hard.” But why should this have been hard for Wallace? By this point in time, with Infinite Jest published a few months previously, he was well on his way to being one of the hundred most acclaimed living English-language writers in the world, where a good deal of people (Zadie Smith, for instance) would likely say, top 100? You mean top 10. Perhaps Wallace is just being humble here, though in that case there is a resulting irony inherent in his praise of Joyce insofar as Joyce will now probably be remembered more as a subject of a Wallace piece than as a top-100 mid-90s tennis player. That is to say, the overwhelming majority of people who know who Michael Joyce is today know this because they’ve read Wallace, not because they watched and admired Joyce’s game firsthand.

But perhaps what Wallace is doing when he admits “I have tried to imagine; it’s hard” is less a bit of humblebragging than the assertion of a disarmingly simple yet critical point : that to imagine is hard. To form in words what one has imagined is even harder. You’re up against the limits of language now, not physics, as well as the limits of yourself. But Wallace was game for this match; it would seem his own early adolescent success in tennis helped prepare him for the writer’s life. There’s a good deal of overlap between them, as it turns out. We often speak of trying to put a new spin on something, and a “zinger” might be a well-delivered bit of wit or a well-hit crosscourt forehand winner. There are verbal volleys and on-court repartees, and reporters no less than tennis pros are always in search of the right angle. Tennis is dialectic made physical, and Wallace was as much a pro at the latter as Joyce was at the former.

Much of what Wallace says about the likes of tennis players Joyce, Austin, and, most famously, Roger Federer, can therefore also be said about the writer Wallace himself. It’s appropriate that String Theory begins with Wallace’s essay on his own junior career as a tennis player, “Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley,” before moving on to those essays in which he discusses the abovementioned players, along with many others. He belongs, that is, as a subject, in the same class as them, and so in the same book, only not as a tennis player per se, but as a tennis player whose game somehow got funneled into writing. He belongs to the same group of which they are members because he’s as excellent at what he does as they are at what they do, which in both cases consists of turning the limitations of a given set of rules into a springboard to a kind of freedom that transcends the very idea of limitation, of rule.

Here’s Wallace on Joyce:

The radical compression of his attention and self has allowed him to become a transcendent practitioner of an art—something few of us get to be. It’s allowed him to visit and test parts of his psyche that most of us do not even know for sure we have, to manifest in concrete form virtues like courage, persistence in the face of pain or exhaustion, performance under wilting scrutiny and pressure.

What does it take to be a writer of Wallace’s caliber, a transcendent practitioner of that art as Wallace no doubt was, if not the radical compression of both attention and self, and a tireless persistence in the face of exhaustion, and an ability to perform under wilting scrutiny and pressure? Joyce was “a figure of enduring and paradoxical fascination” for Wallace; so Wallace might be for me, and for identical reasons. Where Joyce was “a grotesque” to Wallace because of the obsession required on his part to practice his craft at the level at which he practiced it, so Wallace strikes me as similarly freakish: compressed, hampered, paralyzed, and tortured by the very practice that rendered him free, graceful, powerful, and able to transcend the limitations of both his body and his mind. He won by losing; he lost by winning.

And here’s Wallace in “How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart”: “What’s nearly Greek about her career’s arc is that Tracy Austin’s most conspicuous virtue, a relentless workaholic perfectionism that combined with raw talent to make her such a prodigious success, turned out to be also her flaw and bane.” If you swap “Tracy Austin” for “David Foster Wallace” here, the sentence loses none of its logic. If you want to read Wallace on what it means to be a writer, then, you could do worse than starting with his essays on tennis. There’s significant crossover between String Theory and linguistic theory.

After the publication of Infinite Jest, you might have read in one of countless book reviews something like the following: “David Foster Wallace has, figuratively and literally, re-embodied American writing, and for the first time in years the future is unpredictable.” But this is actually Wallace on Federer in the 2006 New York Times article, “Federer Both Flesh and Not”: “He has, figuratively and literally, re-embodied men’s tennis, and for the first time in years the game’s future is unpredictable.” And in what did Federer’s re-embodiment of the game consist? In having taken two prevailing trends in the game, trends seemingly at odds with one another, and somehow fused them into a single game, his own. First, there was the long-predominant serve-and-volley game, or how tennis was traditionally played. Then, in the mid-1980s, there began to emerge the power baseline game, which slowly but surely all but wiped out the serve-and-volley style over the course of the next twenty years. The two styles of play were characterized by different racquets, different tactics and strategies, different demeanors, and so on. The one was graceful, the other brutal, etc. (Wallace offers several thoughts on this aspect of the game’s evolution throughout the essays collected in String Theory ). According to Wallace, what enabled Federer to dominate the men’s game for years on end starting in the early 2000s was that he combined the two. Because of advances in racquet technology, just playing the elegant serve-and-volley game was no longer plausible, which left it to a new generation of baseliners to slug it out against each other. But Federer was able to dominate all of them because he incorporated the grace, the elegance, and the angles of the earlier style into his own ability to wail with the best of them. Advantage, Roger.

Anyone who’s listened to or read enough interviews with Wallace will recognize the narrative here. How did Wallace dominate the field of American letters and leave his own competition in the dust? He did what Federer did. First, he refused to hew to the dictates of what he called “capital ‘R’ Realism” – here, the fiction subgenre equivalent to the serve-and-volley game (or, how one ought to write). That particular “game” had recently become outmoded, displaced by new technologies and a younger generation, but Wallace also refused to pledge allegiance to the newer subgenre of avant-garde “metafiction,” characterized by brutal and relentless irony in contrast to its predecessor’s reliance on straightforward approaches to description. Instead, he synthesized the two, as any careful reader or critic of Infinite Jest will confirm. Wallace could deal in irony with the best of them, and even outplay others at their own game, but you also won’t find a more sincere, openly concerned, and straightforward writer than Wallace, either. For the likes of Brett Easton Ellis, Dave Eggers, and other representatives of what was then indeed (in a rather ugly manner) a decidedly “men’s game,” the consequences were lethal. Wallace eventually outplayed even his own idol, Don DeLillo, just as it was a young Federer who dethroned “King Pete” Sampras at Wimbledon in 2001. Wallace was Federer before Federer.

The appropriate term for what both Wallace and Federer did, however, perhaps isn’t synthesis; more apt would be the Hegelian term, aufheben , which can mean a great many things – to lift up, to abolish, to cancel, to suspend, to sublate, to preserve, to transcend – all at once, where two existing terms are abolished, sublated, transcended by way of the orchestration of a collision between them, out of which a new term emerges, which then itself goes in search of a partner with which to collide. Aufheben is the key to dialectic; from the limitations of preexisting systems, rules, terms, conceptions, and ideas emerge forms more free and competent, more enlightened, and seemingly more effortlessly so.     If I now (something I thought I’d never say) prefer Wallace to Joyce (James this time), this has something to do with it.

In “Democracy and Commerce at the U.S. Open,” Wallace expresses something similar to what Schtitt says about the limitations of tennis when he writes that “part of the beauty of tennis . . . is the way the artistry and energy are bounded by specific lines on court.” Like the essay on Michael Joyce, this one, too, was composed around the same time as the publication of Infinite Jest . It’s easy, in fact, to imagine this line in the essay being borrowed from the book, or at least informing it. In both texts, limitation, be it physical or psychological, is celebrated as a source of excellence, perfection, and beauty rather than lamented as an obstacle thereto. Robert Frost notoriously disliked free verse because it was, he felt, “like playing tennis with the net down”: remove the restrictions and limitations and you remove the possibility of form, of grace, whether it’s in a game like tennis or an art like poetry, or an art like tennis or a game like poetry. (Frost, who taught at Amherst, Wallace’s alma mater, frequently likened poetry to sport, to play.) In a culture predicated in large part on the assumption that being limited equals a kind of failure, insofar as limitation is posited as the opposite of freedom, where freedom is what we embrace, Wallace’s view – that freedom and limitation are less mutually exclusive than they are mutually reinforcing – is refreshing, resonant, and urgent. To see limitation as the seedbed for form, and to proceed accordingly, not to mention diligently, is to discover the very possibility of freedom.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ben Leubner lives and teaches in Bozeman, Montana. His writing has appeared in The Southwest Review , Twentieth-Century Literature , Religion and the Arts , Luna Park Review , and elsewhere. He is currently working on the scholarship of David Foster Wallace, James Merrill, Elizabeth Bishop, and Derek Walcott.

• May 19, 2016

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String Theory: David Foster Wallace on Tennis

“The greatest tennis writer ever.” — Touré, The New York Times Book Review

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David Foster Wallace's 'Federer Moment'

David Foster Wallace's piece on Roger Federer appears this Sunday in The New York Times magazine Play . hide caption

David Foster Wallace's piece on Roger Federer appears this Sunday in The New York Times magazine Play .

David Foster Wallace, a fiction writer and essayist who was a serious junior tennis player, has a well-documented love of the sport. His hulking novel Infinite Jest was partly set at a tennis academy, and his Esquire article about the talents of "power-baseliner" tennis pro Michael Joyce is part of the collection A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again .

Now, Wallace is waxing rhapsodic about the skills of the greatest tennis player alive. In this Sunday's Play magazine section of The New York Times , Wallace has a cover piece entitled "Roger Federer as Religious Experience."

The opening lines of Wallace's article appear below.

"Roger Federer as Religious Experience"

Almost anyone who loves tennis and follows the men's tour on television has, over the last few years, had what might be termed Federer Moments. These are times, as you watch the young Swiss play, when the jaw drops and eyes protrude and sounds are made that bring spouses in from other rooms to see if you're O.K. The Moments are more intense if you've played enough tennis to understand the impossibility of what you just saw him do. We've all got our examples. Here is one. It's the finals of the 2005 U.S. Open, Federer serving to Andre Agassi early in the fourth set. There's a medium-long exchange of groundstrokes, one with the distinctive butterfly shape of today's power-baseline game, Federer and Agassi yanking each other from side to side, each trying to set up the baseline winner ... until suddenly Agassi hits a hard heavy cross-court backhand that pulls Federer way out wide to his ad (=left) side, and Federer gets to it but slices the stretch backhand short, a couple feet past the service line, which of course is the sort of thing Agassi dines out on, and as Federer's scrambling to reverse and get back to center, Agassi's moving in to take the short ball on the rise, and he smacks it hard right back into the same ad corner, trying to wrong-foot Federer, which in fact he does — Federer's still near the corner but running toward the centerline, and the ball's heading to a point behind him now, where he just was, and there's no time to turn his body around, and Agassi's following the shot in to the net at an angle from the backhand side ... and what Federer now does is somehow instantly reverse thrust and sort of skip backward three or four steps, impossibly fast, to hit a forehand out of his backhand corner, all his weight moving backward, and the forehand is a topspin screamer down the line past Agassi at net, who lunges for it but the ball's past him, and it flies straight down the sideline and lands exactly in the deuce corner of Agassi's side, a winner — Federer's still dancing backward as it lands. And there's that familiar little second of shocked silence from the New York crowd before it erupts, and John McEnroe with his color man's headset on TV says (mostly to himself, it sounds like), ''How do you hit a winner from that position?'' And he's right: given Agassi's position and world-class quickness, Federer had to send that ball down a two-inch pipe of space in order to pass him, which he did, moving backwards, with no setup time and none of his weight behind the shot. It was impossible. It was like something out of The Matrix . I don't know what-all sounds were involved, but my spouse says she hurried in and there was popcorn all over the couch and I was down on one knee and my eyeballs looked like novelty-shop eyeballs.

Anyway, that's one example of a Federer Moment, and that was merely on TV — and the truth is that TV tennis is to live tennis pretty much as video porn is to the felt reality of human love.

Journalistically speaking, there is no hot news to offer you about Roger Federer. He is, at 25, the best tennis player currently alive. Maybe the best ever. Bios and profiles abound. ' 60 Minutes' did a feature on him just last year. Anything you want to know about Mr. Roger N.M.I. Federer -- his background, his home town of Basel, Switzerland, his parents' sane and unexploitative support of his talent, his junior tennis career, his early problems with fragility and temper, his beloved junior coach, how that coach's accidental death in 2002 both shattered and annealed Federer and helped make him what he now is, Federer's 39 career singles titles, his eight Grand Slams, his unusually steady and mature commitment to the girlfriend who travels with him (which on the men's tour is rare) and handles his affairs (which on the men's tour is unheard of), his old-school stoicism and mental toughness and good sportsmanship and evident overall decency and thoughtfulness and charitable largess — it's all just a Google search away. Knock yourself out.

This present article is more about a spectator's experience of Federer, and its context. The specific thesis here is that if you've never seen the young man play live, and then do, in person, on the sacred grass of Wimbledon, through the literally withering heat and then wind and rain of the '06 fortnight, then you are apt to have what one of the tournament's press bus drivers describes as a ''bloody near-religious experience.'' It may be tempting, at first, to hear a phrase like this as just one more of the overheated tropes that people resort to to describe the feeling of Federer Moments. But the driver's phrase turns out to be true — literally, for an instant ecstatically — though it takes some time and serious watching to see this truth emerge.

From "Roger Federer as Religious Experience: How One Player's Grace, Speed, Power, Precision, Kinesthetic Virtuosity and Seriously Wicked Topspin Are Transfiguring Men's Tennis," by David Foster Wallace

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On Tennis: Five Essays Kindle Edition

• Print length 99 pages
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• Publisher Little, Brown and Company
• Publication date June 24, 2014
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• ASIN ‏ : ‎ B00FPQA7BG
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Little, Brown and Company (June 24, 2014)
• Publication date ‏ : ‎ June 24, 2014
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• File size ‏ : ‎ 852 KB
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About the author

David foster wallace.

David Foster Wallace wrote the acclaimed novels Infinite Jest and The Broom of the System and the story collections Oblivion, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, and Girl With Curious Hair. His nonfiction includes the essay collections Consider the Lobster and A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, and the full-length work Everything and More.  He died in 2008.

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"Morally Passionate, Passionately Moral": David Foster Wallace and Modernism

2020, The Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies 1.3

It is well know that David Foster Wallace’s fiction borrowed from - and was indebted to - a variety of literary predecessors. While scholars have traced out the influence of many of these sources, particularly with regards to postmodernists like Pynchon, DeLillo, and Barth, as well as international writers, such as Kafka, Borges, and Dostoevsky, one important dialogic partner for Wallace’s work that still has not been studied in enough depth is canonical modernism. In this essay I trace out in detail two stories where Wallace directly engages with, and subverts, the theme and style of modernist masters. First, I look at how “The Soul is not a Smithy” can plausibly be read as a response to Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; then I close with an examination of how “Good People” is a complete inversion of Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants.” In both instances, the modernist texts serves as a useful counterpoint to Wallace’s thematic concerns, and by reading Wallace’s stories stories in conjunction with these source texts we can arrive at a deeper appreciation for Wallace’s developing craft.

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Irish Journal of American Studies Online

In this article I offer an overview and assessment of “Wallace Studies” in the wake of the author’s death, and outline the historically novel forces, technological and critical, that have shaped the early academic reception of Wallace’s work. I survey existing criticism, identify emerging trends at the two conferences in 2009, and identify overlaps between Wallace criticism and wider debates in literary study in the early twenty-first century.

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Leonardo Bevilacqua

Studies in English Drama and Poetry vol. 3. Reading subversion and transgression

Katarzyna Wieckowska

James Dorson

Written while finishing his thesis in philosophy, Wallace’s The Broom of the System ranks among other “novels of ideas” by philosophers like Sartre, Kierkegaard, or Camus. But shortly after Broom was published, Wallace read David Markson’s novel Wittgenstein’s Mistress. Feeling that Markson had completely eclipsed what he had tried to do with Broom, in 1990 Wallace published an effusive 23-page analysis of Wittgenstein’s Mistress in The Review of Contemporary Fiction wherein he dismissed his own novel as “pretty dreadful.” In a little-known interview for Speak magazine in 1996, Wallace expands on why he felt Broom had failed: “If you don’t make fun of me, I’ll tell you what I was trying to do. I was very interested in technical semantics, which is the relationship between form and context. That paragraph at the end [of Broom] is missing the word ‘word,’ so I thought I would bridge both the formal and the reference. Instead, I missed on both counts.” Wallace’s dissatisfaction with his fictional treatment of Wittgenstein’s language-philosophy, especially given how Markson was able to bring it to life, was still fresh in his mind as he wrote his next—and last complete—novel. In the same interview, Wallace describes how his writing approach had evolved since Broom: “Now, ten years later, I understand that people read for intellectual reasons and emotions. And that the ending that I wrote is almost off putting, like giving the finger to the reader. I’m interested in a marriage of the two.” My proposed paper examines the exemplary places where Wallace’s second novel, Infinite Jest, revises and extends the idea content of The Broom of the System and proposes that Wallace’s updated approach, his particular synthesis of intellect and emotion, instantiates a new category of writing: The Postmodern Novel of Ideas.

Studies in the Novel

Bradley J Fest

This essay explores how the apocalypse functions in David Foster Wallace’s The Broom of the System and “Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way.” In each text Wallace develops various aspects of postmodern metafiction’s “Armageddon-explosion,” thereby preparing the ground for the emergence of Infinite Jest. The Broom of the System is apocalyptically structured between two linguistic and narrative teleological poles, Lenore Beadsman Sr. and Norman Bombardini, or rather, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Jacques Derrida. Having emerged from Broom with a theoretical sense of language able to negotiate the dangers of apocalyptic linguistic solipsism, Wallace is then able to confront the dangers of irony in the postmodern literature that preceded him. Working with Paul de Man’s “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” I reconsider Wallace’s relationship with irony in “Westward” through an apocalyptic lens. His work in “Westward” reveals his deep engagement with proposing alternatives to the reifying dominance of contemporary apocalyptic discourse.

Critical Quarterly

Christianity & Literature

Michael O'Connell

This article contends that David Foster Wallace should be read as a contemporary Christian existentialist, one who depicts the alienation of the individual in mass society but also offers a way beyond this condition. Wallace's work grapples with faith and morality in the modern, secular world, and he approaches these issues from a Christian framework, informed by the tensions of his own personal belief and practice. The essay explores the Christian elements in his biography, and then uses Walker Percy's description of the diagnostic novel to examine the form and content of Infinite Jest and The Pale King, Wallace's last two novels.

Normal 2015: Selected WOrks from the Second Annual David Foster Wallace Conference

Journal of The Midwest Modern Language Association

Martin Brick

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David Foster Wallace’s Final Attempt to Make Art Moral

By Jon Baskin

Before David Foster Wallace died by suicide at his California home, in 2008, he left a pile of papers, spiral notebooks, three-ring binders, and floppy disks on a table in his garage. The collection of notes, outlines, prose fragments, character sketches, and partial chapters reportedly ran to hundreds of thousands of words, most of them circling a group of accountants at an office for the Internal Revenue Service in Peoria, Illinois, circa 1985. According to David Hering, a lecturer at the University of Liverpool who has visited Wallace’s archives in Austin, Texas, the material went back more than a decade, to the period immediately after the publication of Wallace’s second novel, the career-making “ Infinite Jest ” (1996). Over the years, Wallace had often referred to the project as the “long thing,” and worried that it was becoming unmanageable. The editor Michael Pietsch, who assembled some of the pages into the book that would become “ The Pale King ,” published in 2011, says Wallace compared writing the novel to “trying to carry a sheet of plywood in a windstorm.” In an e-mail to his friend and sometimes rival Jonathan Franzen, Wallace wrote, “The whole thing is a tornado that won’t hold still long enough for me to see what’s useful and what isn’t.”

As usual, Wallace’s choice of words was not casual. The ability to see what’s useful and what isn’t wasn’t just what Wallace believed that he needed to complete his final novel; it was also the virtue of mind he hoped it would cultivate in his readers. The most common rhetorical mode of “The Pale King” is commotion recollected in tranquillity. “I was like a piece of paper on the street in the wind, thinking, ‘Now I think I’ll blow this way, now I think I’ll blow that way. My essential response to everything was ‘Whatever.’ ” This is from the first page of the monologue of the tax auditor Chris Fogle, who, in the longest continuous portion of the novel, explains to an offstage interviewer the path that brought him to the “Service.” The past tense is to the point: Fogle’s is a conversion narrative that begins with an adolescence during which he “had trouble just paying attention,” and that concludes, following a kind of religious experience in an accounting class at DePaul University, in Chicago, with his deliverance unto his mission as an accountant for the I.R.S.

Fogle’s monologue has now been published as a freestanding novella, christened “ Something to Do with Paying Attention ” (McNally Editions). In the introduction, the bookseller and editor Sarah McNally calls these pages “not just a complete story, but the best concrete example we have of Wallace’s late style, where calm and poise replace the pyrotechnics of Infinite Jest and other early works.” McNally is right to underscore the story’s relatively serene narration, which stands out even more now that it can be encountered independently from the larger book. For much of his career, Wallace was known for interminable footnotes, self-reflexive marginalia, and clause-heavy sentences that doubled back on themselves in an effort to represent the convolutions of the American mind—a mind jammed full of bureaucratic jargon, commercial slogans, and therapeutic pseudo-concepts, then wrapped in the trip wire of postmodern self-consciousness. He did not always want to write like this, though. And Fogle’s monologue offers, as McNally indicates, Wallace’s most sustained effort to adopt the plainspoken frankness that he admired in the “morally passionate, passionately moral” fiction of his Russian heroes, especially Dostoyevsky .

McNally has less to say about how the novella answers a perhaps more urgent question for Wallace, whose stylistic choices were always connected to moral-philosophical ones: what to use this newly frank moral authority for. Learning to “see what’s useful and what isn’t” may appear to be predominantly a matter of self-discipline or character, and at times this was how Wallace treated it. But Wallace’s late works reveal an increasing awareness that separating the useful and the useless also requires an ethical judgment: it means determining what is, or should be, worthy of our committed attention. Is public accountancy, as some of the characters in the novel insist, a moral vocation? What does it mean to be “useful,” whether as an employee of the federal government or as an artist, in the America shaped by Ronald Reagan? Although Wallace’s final work of fiction raises these questions, it does not exactly answer them, and perhaps for good reason.

Since the publication of D. T. Max’s essay “ The Unfinished ,” in 2009, in this magazine, discussions about Wallace in non-scholarly venues have taken a sharply biographical turn. Subsequent first-person accounts came from Wallace’s friends (including Franzen, in his long-form eulogy for this magazine), his former romantic partners (among them the writer Mary Karr, who reported that Wallace kicked her, stalked her, and threatened to kill her husband), and his editors (the latter two categories combined in the former Esquire editor Adrienne Miller’s 2020 memoir “ In the Land of Men ”). These accounts filled in important blanks in Wallace’s personal history, including aspects of his decades-long battle with addiction and depression, and the grim details of his final weeks in California. They also produced a fairly consistent picture of a selfish friend, a manipulative—and likely abusive—boyfriend, and a jealous and self-mythologizing writer. Even were we to desire to do so, there is no way to read Wallace today without knowing these things about him.

It’s worth noting, though, that for attentive readers of Wallace’s fiction, little of the news about his personal life could come as a surprise. Wallace’s great subject was the morass of selfishness, self-rationalization, and intellectualized narcissism into which his cohort of educated, relatively privileged Americans would sink—and were sinking—unless they could find something to love more than they loved themselves. A difference between Wallace and many of his contemporaries—one that sometimes opened him to charges of hypocrisy and self-delusion, not to mention cringeworthy sentimentalism—was his commitment to doing more than merely cataloguing the traps of modern alienation. This did not mean that he claimed to have escaped those traps himself. It did mean, as reflected by his attraction to conversion narratives like Fogle’s, that he hoped he could spring his readers free.

“Something to Do with Paying Attention,” like any worthwhile conversion narrative, begins with the unconverted self. With shame, Fogle recounts being an unfocussed child of the seventies who drifted between jobs and schools in Libertyville, a suburb of Chicago, where he and his “wastoid” friends smoked pot, traded interpretations of what Pink Floyd “truly” meant, and romanticized their “weird kind of narcissistic despair.” In another convention of the genre, part of Fogle’s problem, he sees now, was that he was not aware he had a problem. That starts to change after a sequence that could only have been written by Wallace—the last major American novelist to be fluent in popular television—in which Fogle, watching soap operas in his dorm room at DePaul, in 1978, is struck by a return-from-commercial tagline. The tagline is “ You’re watching As the World Turns”—emphasis Fogle’s. Fogle begins to apprehend, however foggily, “that I might be a real nihilist, that it wasn’t always just a hip pose. That I drifted and quit because nothing meant anything, no one choice was really better.” Beneath the theatrical performance of wastoid anomie, that is, lies the real thing.

The transition, for Fogle and for the reader, is from seeing Fogle’s aimlessness as a generic product of adolescent apathy to understanding it as a symptom of a broader social and spiritual deficit. Wallace was an uncommonly philosophical novelist in part because he believed that cultural life was oriented by a set of dominant ideas and pictures, which were both older and more entrenched than any specific trend or technology. The wasteland in which the wastoids live is, then, not merely attributable to the influence of popular media in seventies America; it emerges from the rocky soil of secular, modern ideals. The invocation of “nihilism”—a word that Fogle uses to describe himself five different times—connects his condition to the skepticism so often targeted by modern philosophers, from Kant to Simone de Beauvoir, in their attempt to secure a rational basis for morality after the death of God. Where Wallace believed that this effort had led is indicated by Fogle’s frustration with his humanities courses, which reflect the exhaustion of the search for a moral order and, in its place, the emergence of a postmodern project that tends to reinforce his nihilistic priors. “The whole point of the classes,” Fogle recalls, “was that nothing meant anything, that everything was abstract and endlessly interpretable.”

It is consistent with Wallace’s long quest for countercultural forces in the places his readers might least expect to find them—the role is played most convincingly by Alcoholics Anonymous in “Infinite Jest”—that Fogle’s conversion experience takes place neither in one of these literature or philosophy courses, nor in a traditional religious setting. Rather, it occurs when he wanders absent-mindedly, still thinking about his dorm-room epiphany, into the wrong classroom on the final day of a semester at DePaul. Instead of American Political Thought, he has arrived just in time for the final lecture in Advanced Tax.

If the soap-opera tagline has primed Fogle for his conversion, the accounting class completes the job. The course is taught by a Jesuit professor who immediately impresses Fogle with his authoritative bearing. (In a parallel to McNally’s judgment of Wallace’s late writing, the professor expresses a “zealous integrity that manifested not as style but as the lack of it.”) Fogle knows nothing about progressive marginal tax rates and adjusted gross income, but he does note a series of remarks the Jesuit makes in support of his conviction that “the accounting profession to which you aspire is, in fact, heroic.” On one of the professor’s transparencies appears a quotation: “What we now need to discover in the social realm is the moral equivalent of war.” (Seeing the attribution to “James,” Fogle assumes the reference is to the “biblical apostle.”) At the end of class, stepping away from his charts for a final flourish, the Jesuit invokes the Kierkegaardian “leap outward” that will be required of the students if they wish to transcend the affectations of their youth and embrace a vocation worthy of an adult. The lecture ends with a corny pun that Fogle registers as a command: “Gentlemen, you are called to account.”

On the level of narrative, all that is left is for Fogle to buy a wool suit and make his way to the I.R.S. regional recruiting office in southwest Chicago—a task that he completes in a subtly haunting scene set amid dazzlingly bright snowbanks left over from the infamous blizzard of 1979, and overlaid with heavy-handed comparisons between entering the Service and signing up for war. The novella ends with Fogle being accepted into a vocation that, based on his comments in the present, has fulfilled all his expectations for it. But to regard Fogle’s conversion as straightforward in this way—that is, in the way it looks to him , post-conversion—is to tell only half the story in “Something to Do with Paying Attention.” For, unlike most of Wallace’s previous works of fiction, which take place either in some fictional future or in intimate settings with little social scaffolding, “The Pale King” is a historical novel.

“All this was in the Chicagoland area in the 1970s, a period that now seems as abstract and unfocused as I was myself,” Fogle recalls. “I seem to remember in 1976 my father openly predicting a Ronald Reagan presidency and even sending their campaign a donation.” Fogle remembers, too, the subtle marks of distinction that make adolescents such reliable guides to a given era: “Girls wore caps or dungaree hats, but most guys were essentially uncool if they wore a hat”; “I remember everyone pretending to be a samurai or saying ‘Excuse me !’ in all sorts of different contexts—this was cool”; “The smell of Brylcreem in my father’s hatband, Deep Throat, Howard Cosell . . .” Details like these are scattered throughout the first half of the novella, partly so Wallace can establish a generational caesura between Fogle and his father, the Reagan-campaign contributor. Fogle’s father is a “cost systems supervisor” for the city of Chicago, who never misses a day of work before dying in a gruesome subway accident in 1977. (Fogle, due to his “dawdling” behind his father on the platform, is partly responsible.) Only after his encounter with the Jesuit professor does Fogle recognize that his rebellion against what he had considered his father’s mindless conformism had itself been a product of mindless conformism. The father and son were “acting out typical roles . . . like machines going through their programmed motions.”

By choosing to follow in his father’s footsteps and devote his life to public service, Fogle seeks to break with his programming and live what he calls a “human” life. The problem is that public service, in the generation separating Fogle from his father, has itself come to be perceived as less and less human. Fogle’s father is part of the Depression-era Silent Generation, a group often associated with values like thrift, patriotism, and respect for authority. Fogle’s generation, by contrast, came of age during the Vietnam War and Watergate, events that created a breach in trust between citizens and their government. (Fogle recalls this being indicated by the ambient phrase “credibility gap.”) As the scholar Marshall Boswell has pointed out, Fogle’s monologue also contains echoes from a long debate about tax policy and ethics, which Pietsch places right before it in “The Pale King.” The debate is between veteran I.R.S. agents who see the agency as a repository of civic virtue and moral responsibility—the “nation’s beating heart”—and a new guard who seek to transform it into “a business—a going, for-profit concern type of thing.” As Boswell notes, the disagreement pits Fogle’s father’s dutiful civic-mindedness against the ascendent corporatist ethos of Fogle’s generation, which believes that “their highest actual duty was to themselves.”

The whole point of Fogle’s monologue, from his perspective, is that the Service has allowed him to subsume his self-interest in some larger purpose. And neither the novella nor “The Pale King” undermines the Jesuit’s teaching that public accountancy can be a noble calling, capable of inculcating virtues—duty, accountability, the ability to complete repetitive work with no expectation of applause—that run counter to the nihilism of the age. But it is no accident that Wallace also sets the story’s events on the cusp of the Reagan revolution, which, largely through tax policy, would hollow out America’s already ailing public institutions, exacerbating the pessimism about government and collective causes that informs Fogle’s initial “malaise.” The story is simultaneously about the lifesaving necessity of sincere, moral commitment and about the impossibility of finding a worthy object for that commitment in the historical period that immediately precedes our own.

Wallace could never have guessed that his final novel, written in the midst of neoliberal disinvestment and end-of-history disenchantment, would appear at the outset of a decade that marked a return to the ethics of conviction. Only one of several artists in his generation to call for a “new sincerity” (a term that he never actually used, though he is justly associated with the tendency) in culture, he was virtually alone in suggesting, with anything like a straight face, that American civic and political life might offer a proper receptacle for that sincerity. Remarkably, in the years that followed the publication of “The Pale King”—years that included events such as Occupy Wall Street, nationwide social movements for racial and gender equality, and the rise of Trumpism—the notion that American artists should make their work subserve political movements became prominent and then virtually inescapable. At times, these causes tempted artists into a kind of grandstanding that was at odds with the valorization, in Fogle’s monologue, of acts undertaken for “no audience.” Still, it is possible that Wallace’s most meaningful influence on the writers and literary commentators who followed him came neither from his stylistic innovations nor his broadsides against postmodern self-consciousness but, rather, from his insistence that literature should aim at a moral purpose that was higher than itself.

Yet the difficulty that Wallace had in finding an object for this purpose proved predictive in a different sense. His inability to locate institutions not already corrupted in near-fatal ways, nor causes dignified enough to hold his skepticism at bay, hinted at the fickle, fugitive quality that would attend so many of the public passions of the ensuing decade. It also suggested why our artists and intellectuals cycle so reliably between utopian evangelism and ironic anti-politics . If Wallace believed that we should pursue the “moral equivalent of war” in the social realm, as James (the pragmatist philosopher, not the apostle) put it, he was also alive to the possibility that our moral wars would be about as decisive, and lead to just as much disillusionment and cynicism, as our military ones. We might read Fogle’s story today as an allegory for Wallace’s attempt to write passionately moral fiction for a society that had lost not only the will but also the capacity to make shared judgments about what’s useful and what isn’t. Wallace was like a man trying to build a new attic on a house whose foundation he knows has collapsed. It’s a kind of dark miracle that he stayed up there so long. ♦

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David Foster Wallace: “Dostoevsky wasn’t just a genius – he was, finally, brave .”

Home » Uncategorized » David Foster Wallace: “Dostoevsky wasn’t just a genius – he was, finally, brave.”

Joseph and Marguerite Frank

I drove over to visit Marguerite Frank at her Stanford apartment one night last week.  She was sorting through mountains of photos and papers of her husband, the late and wonderful Dostoevsky scholar Joseph Frank.

Among the pile, she handed me this, from the Village Voice Literary Supplement: a 1996 review of the first four volumes of Joe’s mammoth Dostoevsky biography.  Here’s the kicker:  they were reviewed by David Foster Wallace , the late great writer who killed himself in 2008.

I hadn’t had the chance to read the edgy author before.  I have to say it was, initially, a bit of a slog.  Wallace intersperses his review with italicized,  existential questions between asterisks (sample:  “What does ‘faith’ mean?” “Is it possible really to love somebody?” ), and the determinedly rambling and offhand style began to grate early on.  Wallace’s long, digressive footnotes are a precursor to Junot Diaz’ s running, footnoted commentary on the history of the Dominican Republic in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, but Diaz is compelling; Wallace just goes on a bit.

It gets better: Wallace picks up considerable steam – both on Fyodor Dostoevsky (a.k.a. FMD) and Joe Frank.  It’s well worth the wait.  Here’s a long excerpt:

“The thing about Dostoevsky’s characters is that they live .  And by this I don’t mean just that they’re successfully realized and believable and ’round.’ The best of them live inside us, forever, once we’ve met them. …

Are we “under a nihilistic spell”?

FMD’s concern was always what it is to be a human being – i.e., how a person, in the particular social and philosophical circumstances of 19th-century Russia, could be a real human being, a person whose life was informed by love and values and principles, instead of being just a very shrewd species of self-preserving animal. …

So, for me anyway, what makes Dostoevsky invaluable is that he possessed a passion, conviction, and engagement with deep moral issues that we, here, today, cannot or do not allow ourselves. And on finishing Frank’s books, I think any serious American reader/writer will find himself driven to think hard about what exactly it is that makes so many of the novelists of our own time look so thematically shallow and lightweight, so impoverished in comparison to Gogol, Dostoevsky , even lesser lights like Lermontov and Turgenev . To inquire of ourselves why we – under our own nihilistic spell – seem to require of our writers an ironic distance from deep convictions or desperate questions, so that contemporary writers have to either make jokes of profound issues or else try somehow to work them in under cover of some formal trick like intertextual quotation or juxtaposition, sticking them inside asterisks as part of some surreal, defamiliarization-of-the-reading-experience flourish.

But it’s just as fair to observe that Dostoevsky operated under some serious cultural constraints of his own: a repressive government, state censorship, and above all the popularity of post-Enlightenment European thought, much of which went directly against beliefs he held dear and wanted to write about.  The thing is that Dostoevsky wasn’t just a genius – he was, finally, brave .  … who is to blame for the philosophical passionlessness of our own Dostoevskys? The culture, the laughers? But they wouldn’t – could not – laugh if a piece of passionately serious ideological contemporary fiction was also ingenious and radiantly transcendent fiction.  But how to do that – how even, for a writer, even a very talented writer, to get up the guts to even try?  There are no formulae or guarantees. But there are models. Frank’s books present a hologram of one of them.”

Tags: "Joseph Frank" , David Foster Wallace , Fyodor Dostoevsky

This entry was posted on Monday, April 1st, 2013 at 6:46 pm by Cynthia Haven and is filed under Uncategorized . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

6 Responses to “David Foster Wallace: “Dostoevsky wasn’t just a genius – he was, finally, brave .””

I’ve always liked that essay of Wallace’s. Am I remembering correctly that Wallace says Smerdyakov is the character with whom he most identifies? I find that so sad and rather chilling, given the circumstances of Wallace’s death.

[…] at 8:45 on April 9, 2013 by Andrew Sullivan Cynthia Haven dug up a 1996 David Foster Wallace review of the first four volumes of Joseph Frank’s behemoth […]

I love this essay on Dos. It is fun, flamboyant and nonchalant. I think DFW had a thing for Dos. The brothers Incandenza are clearly the Karazamov’s incarnate. DFW interminable theme of “what its like to be a fucken human being”, constantly plays out in all his writing and which Dos. sketched and was in all his suffering and misery.

Very informative blog.Wallace was born in Ithaca, New York, the son of Sally Jean (née Foster) and James Donald Wallace. In his early childhood, Wallace lived in Champaign, Illinois. In fourth grade, he moved to Urbana and attended Yankee Ridge school and Urbana High School. Keep posting such amazing posts.

It’s a tough row to hoe, to be the constant challenger to ironic detachment. Harder still to be risk being uncool arguing that true purpose of fiction is to make us feel a little bit less alone. The line separating sentiment from sincerity is a tricky one. Karen Green, in her amazing memoir relates regular conversations where Wallace express his concerns about being “squishy”.

But he did it anyway. Took that high ground and wasn’t scared to shout it out.

If you haven’t read any other DFW I envy you, you’ve got so much to look forward to! I promise that any and all efforts to read the great man’s work will be rewarded many times over. Thanks for this, I hadn’t known about this particular DFW piece, though I’m sure if DFW’s indefatigable agent Bonnie Nadel hasn’t republished it yet she’ll get to it, god bless her.

Thanks for checking in, Jon!

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An Appraisal

John Barth, a Novelist Who Found Possibility in a ‘Used-Up’ Form

By merrily using fiction to dissect itself, he was at the vanguard of a movement that defined a postwar American style.

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By Dave Kim

Dave Kim is an editor at the Book Review.

Nobody likes the comic who explains his own material, but the writer John Barth, who died on Tuesday, had a way of making explanations — of gags, of stories, of the whole creative enterprise — sing louder and funnier and truer than punchlines. The maxim “Show, don’t tell” had little purchase with him. In novels, short stories and essays, through an astoundingly prolific six-decade career, he ran riot over literary rules and conventions, even as he displayed, with meticulous discipline, mastery of and respect for them.

He was styled a postmodernist, an awkwardly fitting title that only just managed to cover his essential attributes, like a swimsuit left too long in the dryer. But it meant that much of what Barth was doing — cheekily recycling dusty forms, shining klieg lights on the artificiality of art, turning the tyranny of plot against itself — had a name, a movement.

For many years, starting in the 1960s, he was at the vanguard of this movement, alongside writers like Thomas Pynchon and William Gaddis. He declared that all paths for the novel had already been taken, and then blazed new ones for generations of awe-struck followers. He showed us how writing works by letting us peer into its machinery, and reminded us that our experience of the world will always be dictated by the instruments we have to observe and record it. While never abandoning narrative, he found endless joy in picking apart its elements, and in the process helped define a postwar American style.

Were Barth the author of this article, for example, he might pause here to point out that the lines above constitute what journalists like to call the nut graf , an early paragraph that provides larger context for the topic at hand and tries to establish its importance — and is sometimes wedged in last-minute by a harried writer or editor ordered to “elevate” a story or “give it sweep.” Then Barth might explain why this one is lousy, why the whole business of nut grafs is more or less absurd.

The constructive disruption, the literary public service announcement: It became something of a signature for Barth, and it’s best expressed in his story collection “Lost in the Funhouse” (1968). The title piece, a masterwork of metafiction, follows a teenage boy lurching about the revolving discs and mirrored walls of an amusement-park fun house, where he realizes, dolefully, that he is better suited to construct such contrivances than experience them.

Throughout, a comically pedantic narrator critiques the very tale he’s telling by identifying the flashy tricks of the “funhouse” that is fiction: symbolism, theme, sensory detail, resolution. The story is simultaneously a rigorous analysis, vivid example and ruthless dismantling of how literature operates.

“Is anything more tiresome, in fiction, than the problems of sensitive adolescents?” the narrator asks, in his fiction about a sensitive adolescent. “And it’s all too long and rambling.”

David Foster Wallace called the collection a “sacred text,” even drafting one of his stories in the margins of his copy. Although he later, in an act of literary parricide, denounced his hero as a stagnant has-been, Barth’s influence is unmistakable in Wallace’s work, as it is in that of so many others, including Zadie Smith, Jonathan Lethem, Jennifer Egan, George Saunders and David Mitchell — writers who hauled postmodernism off its ivory tower, who integrated Barth’s fourth-wall breaches, parodic masquerades or typographical pyrotechnics into more accessible, more sincere and, fine, more marketable narratives.

Barth himself was a writer who wore his influences on his sleeve, though he was careful to make his tributes his own, often with an awl-sharp irony. “You do not mistake your navigation stars for your destination,” he said in a 2001 interview with the critic Michael Silverblatt. “These are compass points that you steer by, but you’re not trying to be Joyce or Beckett or Nabokov or Calvino or Borges just because you steer by those stars. They help you fix your own position.”

In 1967, he wrote an essay called “ The Literature of Exhaustion ,” a state-of-the-union address for Western letters that would come to be known, to Barth’s befuddlement, as a manifesto for postmodernism. It is one of those loosely read, perennially misinterpreted early-career works that both forge their writers’ reputations and drive them nuts for the rest of their lives.

In it, he points to the “used-upness” of literary forms, the exhaustion of creative possibilities, as a rousing opportunity for new methods based on pastiche and revival — “by no means necessarily a cause for despair,” he insisted. But many readers still took it as a death knell for the novel. Barth had to write a follow-up years later to set the record straight.

Much of his raw material actually came from writers of classic texts, not the modern and postmodern navigation stars he steered by. He was Dante reworking the “Aeneid” into “The Divine Comedy” — if Dante were a shiny-pated, bespectacled Marylander with a police-detective mustache. “The Sot-Weed Factor” (1960) is an epic imitation of the 18th-century bildungsroman, something A.I. bots might aspire to if the prompt were, say, “‘Tom Jones’ plus ‘Tristram Shandy,’ but hornier.” (It’s great.) His 2004 story collection, “The Book of Ten Nights and a Night,” is a “Decameron” set in the days after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Scheherazade, whom Barth called his “literary patron saint,” is a regular presence in his work.

And, of course, there’s Barth’s opus “Giles Goat-Boy” (1966), a bonkers Cold War allegory that draws from the Bible, “Oedipus Rex,” “Don Quixote” and “Ulysses,” among other works. I tried to summarize its many forking paths for a curious bartender once and started to feel dizzy midway through. A bitterly divided college campus is overrun by a tyrannical computer system called WESCAC, and the only one who can save humanity is a boy named George Giles, who was raised as a goat and somehow turns out to be the offspring of WESCAC and a virgin named Lady Creamhair. (It’s great.)

Giles tries his best to live up to the mythic hero archetype, but soon learns, over and over, that simply being human is complicated enough. For all of Barth’s outrageous experiments, he always seemed to find his way back to the basic moral question that every great fiction writer has tried to wrangle: How should one be?

His second novel, “The End of the Road” (1958), is a profound deliberation on the dominant Western philosophy of its time, existentialism, which Barth, in a Camus-like story of a marital affair, first seems to value and then exposes as obscenely inadequate. Anchoring even his most arcane metafictions are recognizable characters who try to commit to a principle or an identity — and often fail spectacularly.

In this way, Barth was closer to the comforts of traditional fiction than he was given credit for. A true postmodernist, he wrote in 1980, keeps “one foot in fantasy, one in objective reality.” His books are long — the novels tend to gallivant far past the 500-page mark — and laborious. But like an abstract painter proving he still has some realist portraiture left in him, he could sometimes play it straight and write fiction that, as he put it, “just tells itself without ever-forever reminding us that it’s words on paper.” Take a peek at “Ambrose His Mark” (from “Lost in the Funhouse”) and “Toga Party” (from his 2008 collection “The Development”) for superb examples.

But Barth’s most memorable writing remains the stuff that works on both levels: the gently rising and falling slopes of narrative and the zany mirror maze of self-reflexivity. You get the sense that he found the latter a wearying realm to read in, let alone write in, but couldn’t help veering into it, that the phoniness of the whole endeavor, including his own persona as the artist, had to be accounted for. “It’s particularly disquieting to suspect not only that one is a fictional character,” he wrote, “but that the fiction one’s in — the fiction one is — is quite the sort one least prefers.”

Reading Barth is like taking a cross-country flight while sitting in the cockpit with the pilot, a journey made more thrilling by our observation of the mechanisms that make it possible: We can stare in awe at the instrument panels, or just look out the window. But, through it all, his impossible desire to be his own reader, a naïve experiencer of his own narrative, never waned. One imagines the maestro himself snapping his fingers impatiently at the text. “Enough with the diversions,” he might say. “On with the story!”

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