String Theory

This was so good. I think some of David Foster Wallace’s best writing, if not his best, is about tennis (my favorite sections of Infinite Jest were those on tennis as well). This book is a compendium of 5 long-form essays Wallace wrote, ranging from his time as a junior player to his analysis of the 1995 US Open during the Agassi era to the Federer-Nadal Wimbledon Final.

I’m obviously not the first to note this, but the fact that DFW was a good, not great, junior player as a teenager in the mid-west (paired with the wonderfully crazed analytical nature of his mind) is the essential differentiating factor with his writing on sports. You can feel in every page the fact that Wallace knows just enough of what the players are experiencing to access it linguistically but so far diverges from their actual experience to put his other literary foot with that of the reader, with whom he shares the awe or absurdity of the spectacle.