“There is about world-class athletes carving out exemptions from physical laws a transcendent beauty that makes manifest God in man… Great athletes are profundity in motion. They enable attractions like power and grace and control to become not only incarnate but televisable. To be a top athlete, performing, is to be that exquisite hybrid of animal and angel that we average unbeautiful watchers have such a hard time seeing in ourselves.”
Like much of David Foster Wallace’s work, when he writes about tennis, you can’t help but feel like you have been missing something vital — a layer of brilliance, futility, and detail that only he can reveal through his meticulous, intellectual prose.
String Theory: David Foster Wallace on Tennis was published posthumously in 2016 by Library of America, a non-profit publisher dedicated to American literature. The collection comprises five essays; “Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley,” “How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart,” “Tennis Player Michael Joyce’s Professional Artistry as a Paradigm of Certain Stuff about Choice, Freedom, Limitation, Joy, Grotesqueries, and Human Completeness,” “Democracy and Commerce at the U.S. Open,” and “Federer Both Flesh and Not.”
The works pertaining to tennis in String Theory are drawn from Wallace’s previous essay collections A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (1997), Consider the Lobster (2005), and Both Flesh and Not (2012) which, in turn, are essays originally published in magazines and journal publications throughout his career. String Theory is arranged in order of publication, with “Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley” first published in 1991 and “Federer Both Flesh and Not” in 2006.
Tennis was a recurring motif throughout Wallace’s career. In his seminal 1996 work Infinite Jest, an elite tennis academy serves as a central setting of the novel. Reading String Theory, it’s abundantly clear to me why tennis fascinated Wallace through his literary prime: he passionately loved the sport with all its vectors, symbolisms, and grace.
The best piece of sports writing in the book is “Federer Both Flesh and Not.” The essay is a celebration of Roger Federer, where Wallace skilfully bounces between the “mystery and metaphysics” of the sport and its “technical” aspects to explain Federer’s almost inhuman ability.
The essay is phenomenal, capturing the grace and dynamism of an athlete in words is no easy task. Wallace crafts seraphic lines such as “Federer’s forehand is a great liquid whip” and describes him as “a creature whose body is both flesh and, somehow light.” All the while, he also incorporates expert analysis of tennis mechanics, from the minute intricacies of spins to slices; “Further slight changes in the curves of your groundstroke’s motion and follow-through will help determine how high your return passes over the net, which, together with the speed at which you’re swinging (along with certain characteristics of the spin you impact) will affect how deep or shallow in the opponent’s court your return lands…” and so on.
He continues like this for pages.
My favourite excerpt from the collection comes from this piece, which summarizes the general theme of the collection: “The human beauty we’re talking about here is beauty of a particular type; it might be called kinetic beauty. Its power and appeal are universal. It has nothing to do with sex or cultural norms. What it seems to have to do with, really, is human beings’ reconciliation with the fact of having a body.” Only Wallace could articulate the divine and existential with the swinging of a racket. He is floored by these elite tennis players, crafting a profound literary work of sports journalism that is unparalleled in the genre.
Another interesting essay is “How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart.” In this piece, Wallace analyzes women’s tennis prodigy Tracy Austin’s autobiography Beyond Centre Court, attempting to understand why elite athletes like Austin are seemingly “blind and dumb” about their athletic brilliance. Contemporary examples of athletes being “stunningly inarticulate” include the often-parodied locker room interview and the recent viral nonchalance of soccer star Cole Palmer.
Wallace offers philosophical insight into athlete autobiographies and the concept of brilliance: subjects rarely explored in sports writing. He concludes in the essay, “Those who receive and act out the gift of athletic genius must, perforce, be blind and dumb about it — and not because blindness and dumbness are the price of the gift, but because they are its essence.”
As the lengthy title suggests, “Tennis Player Michael Joyce’s Professional Artistry…” is a tad drawn out, yet it still offers a strong insight into Wallace’s skill not only as a tennis commentator but a human commentator. The essay explores the futility of near-greatness in athletes and is packed with Wallace’s signature cynicism. He describes the lives of athletes as “A consent to live in a world that, like a child’s world, is very serious and very small.”
“Democracy and Commerce at the U.S. Open” is, by far, the weakest in the collection by some margin, although I may have been experiencing some classic ‘Wallace burnout’ by the time I got to the essay. Readers familiar with Wallace’s hyper-descriptive, lengthy footnote style will find these two pieces the most familiar. While still strong and no doubt appealing to some, the more descriptive, pessimistic tones of “Tennis Player Michael Joyce’s Professional Artistry…” and “Democracy and Commerce at the U.S. Open” lack the subtle joy and the overt passion for tennis that make the other essays more enjoyable as pieces of sports writing — especially because Wallace is so rarely upbeat in his work
The best work overall in the collection is “Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley.” More abstract and less of a sports journalism piece than his other essays, it explores Wallace’s teenage years as a “near-great junior tennis player.” He touches on topics like the weather, complex geometry, and his hometown of Philo, Illinois, in an explanation of his near-greatness as a player — ultimately revealing more about himself as a person than as an athlete. “I’d grown up inside vectors, lines and lines athwart lines, grids,” he said about the Midwest, and “I was extremely comfortable inside straight lines.”
But Wallace was never going to be a conformist. In the essay’s climax, teenage Wallace is tossed around like a tennis ball by a tornado on a Midwest tennis court. He never got better at tennis after that incident.
Throughout String Theory, Wallace seems to flex his literary muscles, positioning himself alongside the elite athletes in his own court. There is undeniable greatness in Federer’s 20 Grand Slam titles, but Wallace also manifests a different kind of greatness by capturing that brilliance in text. I am in awe of his awe. The palpable sense of jealousy, smugness, and admiration in his writing makes the work feel deeply human and relatable.
Overall, the essay collection is an intellectual, nerdy, and dense piece of sports journalism. It’s a must-read for tennis fans and sports-writing enthusiasts alike. While not Wallace’s best work — in my opinion, he excels most when writing abstract fiction unconstrained by the bounds of reality — String Theory is a rare and wonderful blend of the literary, mathematical, and sporting.
The unbending lines of tennis, literature, nor life itself could contain the brilliance of David Foster Wallace, but String Theory serves up some damn good attempts.
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