Tennis Is Not the Literary Sport In His Essay on David Foster Wallace, John Jeremiah Sullivan Flirts With a Distortion of Category
String Theory , the Library of America’s brief anthology of David Foster Wallace’s tennis writing, shouts “gift” when you pick it up. It is easy to hold, both pleasantly hard and light. The cover is rendered mostly in the wet green of a tennis court, the “o” of Theory printed in the “optic yellow” introduced in 1972 to help people track a tennis ball while watching on television. The rest of the type is white, and all of it is embossed onto the front board, a design that suggests the frugality of the patrician. By dispensing with a common element—a dust jacket, the unnecessary team member—the object becomes quietly informative, authoritative by virtue of choosing to be minimal. One of the main attributes of the patrician aesthetic is to mask effort, to erase the body. But sports are themselves because of a body, and athleticism has its own language. You can’t flatten a sport. These five Wallace essays are common to syllabi and easily found in other collections, so they won’t surprise anyone who already knows his writing. As an introduction to
By Sasha Frere- Jones
Portrait by Joan LeMay
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