26 Sep 2013 04:11:27
David Foster Wallace once told an interviewer that the difference between his fiction-writing persona and his non‑fiction, essay-writing persona was that the latter was "a little stupider and schmuckier than I am". Even if we take this statement at face value, it works in two ways. The way I like to approach it is to recall those still watches of the night, when I ask myself if I feel ashamed at never having finished his 1,200-plus page novel, Infinite Jest, murmur "only a very little bit", and then go back to sleep. Bring on the (relative) stupidity and schmuckiness. But his non-fiction work, of which this is the third collection, I will soak up like a sponge. And if he is being stupider and schmuckier than when writing a novel, or thinking Deep Thoughts about novels, then he is still far from being either stupid or a schmuck, because if you think that giving us, say, a masterly but concise account of the difference between Wittgenstein's Tractatus and his Philosophical Investigations is the action of an idiot, then you have high standards indeed. Then again, his non-schmuckiness is itself revealed in the footnote crediting a description of Wittgenstein to "Dr James D Wallace [ie DFW's father], unpublished response to his son's cries for help with ...Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus". (That DFW himself was very up-to-the‑mark on philosophy and probably didn't need his father's help makes the joke all the tenderer, and funnier.)
As you can see, his style is infectious. And it's not just me. A review of Infinite Jest by Dale Peck, a review so withering that it would have driven even an untroubled writer – which DFW most assuredly was not – to despair, was nevertheless written almost entirely in his cadences (it's also one of those reviews that has the paradoxical effect of making you want to read the novel being trashed more than you did before).
So in this collection we have more of his trademark epic sentences, digressions within digressions, footnotes so long that they leave the main text of the piece as only a thin crust of prose floating delicately on top of the page, the use of initials to save time – and all with a kind of manic sensitivity and charm. It's the work of a mind almost outrunning itself with its own insight and clarity, the way that you think you're thinking when you're stoned. (If you read DT Max's Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story, his workmanlike biography of DFW, you'll learn that before he went straight, he smoked championship amounts of weed, and it still didn't stop him being the brightest boy in class, by miles.)
The pieces here, though, are not all quite as substantial as those in his previous collections, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again and Consider the Lobster. In some cases, there's an overlap of subject matter, such as his splendidly pernickety approach to grammar and the English language (are you sure you know what "to beg the question" means? Really sure?), and, of course, tennis. Then again, his piece on Roger Federer, which gives this collection its title, is essential reading even – especially – if you don't like sports writing. His case in favour of The Terminator over Terminator 2 should have you standing on a chair and cheering, while his devastating essay on MFA (ie creative writing) classes in the US, written while he was actually teaching MFA classes in the US is, 25 years on, as stirring a statement of intent as you'll ever read about writing fiction. His introduction to The Best American Essays 2007, in which he says that "just about every word on [the] ... front cover turns out to be vague, debatable, disingenuous" is one of the finest examples of taking a beautifully shaped bite out of the hand that is feeding him.
