David Foster Wallace, "Federer Both Flesh and Not"

verbal tornadoes & salt crystals

“But the truth is that whatever deity, entity, energy, or random genetic flux produces sick children also produced Roger Federer, and just look at him down there.”

A couple of years before his suicide — in what would turn out to be the last good, or even tolerable, stretch of his life — David Foster Wallace accepted an assignment from The New York Times. At the time he was struggling to write his follow-up to Infinite Jest (he said it felt like “wrestling sheets of balsa wood in a high wind”), so the assignment must have come as something of a relief. All the more so because it involved a subject he truly loved: tennis.

So off he went to Wimbledon — as he’d gone off before to cruise ships, state fairs, and pornography trade shows — but once there he didn’t do what Wallace-readers had by then come to expect him to do, which was: to spin up a verbal tornado of sense impressions, comic bits of quite-possibly-invented dialogue, and far-fetched academy-inflected hypotheses, all held together by a distinctive — often maddeningly distinctive — voice. Instead he pared himself down, limited his scope, relaxed his shoulders — and wrote the best thing he’d ever written (and, as it happened, ever would).

Essays occupy a peculiar place in the Wallace canon: they are the things he was best at, and the things he valued least. And this isn’t a coincidence: he was so good at essays, I suspect, because he cared so much less about them than he cared about fiction. The Wallace we encounter in his fiction is made all-but-hostile by his anxiety to demonstrate his genius (however much his MacArthur “genius” award earned him, he’d have been better off without it). Infinite Jest is like a dinner guest so eager to impress that he (it is definitely a he) talks over everyone else, doesn’t notice that he’s shoved his elbow into the mashed potatoes, and accidentally insults the host. Whatever brilliance there is in the book — and there really is brilliance in it — is impossible to appreciate so long as its loud, relentless voice is in your ear.     

The essays aren’t like that. Even the tornadic ones are shapely, lively, full of lines that make you exhale sudden nose-huffs of surprised admiration. They read as if they were fun to write (this is a strangely reliable indicator of excellence). 

The Wimbledon essay — ostensibly a profile of Roger Federer — is deliberately modest in scope:

“Journalistically speaking, there is no hot news to offer you about Roger Federer. He is, at twenty-five, the best tennis player currently alive. Maybe the best ever. Bios and profiles abound.”  

In lieu of breaking new ground, Wallace is going to watch Federer’s final against Rafael Nadal (“he of the unsleeved biceps and Kabuki self-exhortations,”) and he’s going to write down what he sees. “Nadal, on the run, backhands it hard down the line to Federer’s backhand; Federer slices it right back down the same line, slow and floaty with backspin, making Nadal return to the same spot.” The most insistently cerebral writer of his generation is going to submerge himself in an emphatically non-cerebral activity (“we’re more in the operative range of reflexes, purely physical reactions that bypass conscious thought,”) and he is, contra his every inclination, going to resist making it mean something. Almost.

It’s the loveliness of what he’s able to wedge into that almost — and the sneaky skill with which he accomplishes the wedging — that makes the essay.

Early on, Wallace describes a mundane moment of pre-match pomp and circumstance:

“Right before play, up at the net, there’s a ceremonial coin-toss to see who’ll serve first… The honorary coin-tosser this year is William Caines, assisted by the umpire and tournament referee. William Caines is a seven-year-old from Kent who contracted liver cancer at age two and somehow survived after surgery and horrific chemo.” 

The reader thinks nothing of it — just Wallace transcribing the reality before him — until a peculiar couple of sentences at the end of the paragraph:

“Theres a feeling of something important, something both uncomfortable and not, about a child with cancer tossing this dream-final’s coin. The feeling, what-all it might mean, has a tip-of-the-tongue-type quality that remains elusive for at least the first two sets.” 

Then it’s right back to the match and the profile — with some brief, journalistically defensible detours into the history of the power-baseline game and the evolution in racket technology. William Caines falls out of the reader’s mind entirely.

But not Wallace’s. 

A few pages later, in a paragraph of its own, we get something like a short, short story:

“According to reliable sources, honorary coin-tosser William Caines’ backstory is that one day, when he was two and a half, his mother found a lump in his tummy, and took him to the doctor, and the lump was diagnosed as a malignant liver tumor. At which point one cannot, of course, imagine…”

So, we think (as the essay once more takes up its deuces and crosscourt backhands), Wallace is up to something. He’s setting us up. But for what? 

When, a few pages later, the essay’s end comes into view (that telltale 2006 in small print at the end of a page) and Wallace is still up to his ears in groundstrokes, we think: was that it? Did we misunderstand something? Or was that business with William Caines a misdirection, as in the famously truncated and unsatisfying ends of his novels?

No. Wallace’s essays — unlike his novels — balance their checkbooks. Because there, at the end of yet another paragraph about Federer’s uncanny physical brilliance, is a footnote. 

The small print begins unpromisingly: “In the ’06 final’s third set, at three games all and 30-15, Nadal kicks his second serve high to Federer’s backhand.” It goes on like this, your eyes confirm with a flick downward, for a dense and tiny paragraph. Thanks but I’ll watch the match on YouTube, you might very well find yourself thinking. But keep reading.

Because in its second paragraph (yes, it has a second paragraph), the footnote takes a startling turn. For no obvious reason, Wallace decides that this is the moment to return to William Caines — and to resolve the tension that’s been quietly lingering since his first mention of an elusive, not-quite-identifiable sensation.

“By the way, it’s right around here, or the next game, watching, that three separate inner-type things come together and mesh. One is a feeling of deep personal privilege at being alive to get to see this; another is the thought that William Caines is probably somewhere here in the Centre Court crowd, too, watching, maybe with his mum…”     

Wallace — who, remember, would kill himself just two years later, and who had struggled his entire adult life with a pulverizing depression — is feeling lucky to be alive. And so is the reader. Because in language that’s as intimate and heartfelt as a late-night email from a close friend (“It’s hard to describe — it’s like a thought that’s also a feeling,”) Wallace finally groks (that delicious sensation of finally remembering a long-groped-after name!) what it is that had been bothering him during the coin toss. It’s a symmetry both cruel and beautiful.

“One wouldn’t want to make too much of it, or to pretend that it’s any sort of equitable balance; that would be grotesque. But the truth is that whatever deity, entity, energy, or random genetic flux produces sick children also produced Roger Federer, and just look at him down there. Look at that.”  

This — tucked within a footnote like a crystal of salt in the interior of a pastry — is the essay’s payoff. Just look at him down there. The un-self-conscious simplicity of that, the authenticity of the awe. This is the moment at which a profile of a professional athlete — a genre so slack and predictable that the players have largely taken over writing them themselves — becomes a work of art. Federer’s physical mastery, beautifully evoked throughout the essay, now means something — it’s a kind of compensation, however inadequate, for the capricious cruelty of embodied life.

“Having a body is terrible,” Wallace writes early on. “If this is not so obviously true that no one needs examples, we can just quickly mention pain, sores, odors, nausea, aging, gravity, sepsis, clumsiness, illness, limits…” Brilliance like Federer’s — and like Wallace’s — reminds us of the other side of the ledger.