The sporty side of David Foster Wallace

BOTH FLESH AND NOT By David Foster Wallace 328 pages

Available at Powerbooks

Writer David Foster Wallace was so prolific during his heyday, showing an affinity for so many different subjects — whether it was math, travel, tennis, or lobsters — it was tempting to think he’d never run out of material.

All that changed with his self-inflicted death in 2008.

Since then, we’ve seen posthumous publication of an unfinished novel (The Pale King), a lengthy, often revealing dialogue with the writer (Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself), a biography  (Every Love Story is a Ghost Story), and even his commencement speech to Kenyon College graduates (This is Water).

With Both Flesh and Not, it appears that the Wallace well has run a bit dry. Repackaging magazine pieces drawn from a decade or so prior to his death is not a priori a bad thing; and at least Both Flesh and Not contains two killer essays on tennis, one of the writer’s mainline passions. But the rest is a bit slapdash, and more than a little hodgepodge. It reminds you of the Jimi Hendrix estate, still releasing “new” recordings by the guitarist, 40 years after his death. Holding it up next to the superior earlier collection, Consider the Lobster, it’s hard to imagine Wallace would have selected all of these pieces for re-publication.

Fortunately, Wallace could make almost every subject interesting to those with patience enough to pursue his line of thought. Whether he’s writing about the effects of wind on Midwestern tennis players (in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again) or the diminishing returns of James Cameron’s Terminator 2 (in Both Flesh and Not), Wallace often took the pop culture route to disguise weightier matters; the low road was always a pathway back to our minds. But then, Wallace didn’t think “low” pop culture was low at all; he wallowed in cheesy movies, cheesy music, cheesy junk food. His brain just processed it in an original way.

Both Flesh and Not opens with “Federer Both Flesh and Not,” a justly praised article in which Wallace explores Roger Federer’s “preternatural” gift for tennis. The thrill is in how deeply absorbed Wallace gets in his subject; his writing in almost kinetic: it places us, not just on court with Federer against Nadal or other opponents, but with a peripheral vision that takes in pointillist neon signs, ballboys picking up pieces of racket plastic from beneath players’ chairs, the almost-religious declarations of fans in the stands. Wallace is always there: you are there with him, seeing it through his rapid-reporting eyes, coursing along his very brain stem.

Except, that is, on subjects where he’s not really there; the throwaway book reviews included here (Wittgenstein’s Mistresses, Mr. Cogito) seem like book padding, as do the surveys of American literature (“Fictional Futures and the Conspiciously Young”) and notes on novels (“Five Direly Underappreciated U.S. Novels”). Some of the material was cannibalized from earlier essays in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. Each selection is interspersed with a vocabulary list apparently ransacked from Wallace’s computer, on which “he constantly updated a list of words that he wanted to learn, culling from numerous sources and writing brief definitions and usage notes.” These lists are kind of fun to read, and informative, but you kind of wonder, what’s next? Grocery lists?

Then again, Wallace taught writing at Pomona College. So it’s only natural that people would like to know about his fondness for words like “stanchion” or “thrombus.” And in the instructive essay “Twenty Four Word Notes” he lays down for posterity a pet peeve of more than a few newspaper editors (myself included): the misuse of the phrase “beg the question.” (As in, “That begs the question, why does Facebook need so many new privacy settings anyway?”) Philosophy students will recognize that “begging the question” refers specifically to a method of argument in which you assume to be true in your premise the very point you’re trying to prove in your argument (“Abortion is wrong because it’s murder”). This misuse apparently set Wallace’s hair follicles on end, and I sympathize; I find myself finding-and-replacing “begs the question” with “raises the question” about 100 percent of the time when editing. It’s just wrong.

But anyway, Wallace is very entertaining when discussing writing itself, as in “The Nature of the Fun,” in which he (via Don DeLillo) compares working on new fiction to a “hideously damaged infant that follows the writer around… hydrocephalic and noseless and flipper-armed and incontinent and dribbling cerebrospinal fluid out of its mouth as it mewls and blurbles and cries out to the writer, wanting love, wanting the very thing its hideousness guarantees it’ll get: the writer’s complete attention.” Extreme, perhaps; but a pretty accurate depiction of the love/hate dynamic driving the creative process.

There’s a piece on Borges that shows just why the Argentine writer’s mythos matters; and a piece on the rise of cinematic Math Melodrama (movies like Good Will Hunting, A Beautiful Mind) that presages the cult of geekdom we all live in now. The essay on Terminator 2’s legacy also seems prescient, with Wallace noting that sci-fi, like most Hollywood genres, falls prey to the Inverse Cost and Quality Law (“basically states the larger a movie’s budget is, the shittier that movie is going to be”) and proving T2 to be a prime example.

Yet it’s the two tennis articles that show us what Wallace was capable of doing with the sports experience (these two essays appeared in print years ago, of course; Nadal was still in his Neanderthal, knuckle-dragging phase on the court; Federer was as yet unbeatable). In “Federer Both Flesh and Not,” he examines the evolution of the racket, the game-changing nature of topspin, and Federer as the ultimate embodiment of the new pro game. Writing in 2006 about Federer’s ascent, he finds the Swiss player’s skill goes beyond mere physical strength and speed; he sees an eerie level of “kinesthetic sense” and “occult anticipation” in the player’s ability to slow down the approaching volley and view it as “big as a bowling ball.” (This would sound like pure B.S., if Wallace didn’t understand the game from the inside, as a junior ranked tennis player himself.) The second essay, on the US Open, is crammed wall to wall with Wallace’s obsessive detailing, going on to excessive length simply to reveal that there’s lots of stuff being sold at Flushing Meadows during the US Open.

Better to jump around, strategically enjoying the bits of Both Flesh and Not that might appeal to you. What emerges is that reading Wallace often requires some of the same kinesthetic sense and ability to read minute shifts as tennis does; it’s tiring and challenging at times, but the rewards can be euphoric. Game on.