David Foster Wallace's 'String Theory' defines Roger Federer, but that's only the beginning

• Douglas Perry | The Oregonian/OregonLive

David Foster Wallace is not for everybody.

The late author was arguably the first great hipster writer, a mixture of Kerouac-like stream of consciousness and Feynmanian technical exuberance. His prose is gorgeous, but it's also infuriating, full of tics and asides. A lot of people love his 1996 novel "Infinite Jest," but there are also a lot of copies out there that were abandoned after a few chapters. "While there are many uninteresting pages in this novel, there are not many uninteresting sentences," Jay McInerney wrote in his New York Times review of the book.

That's a little harsh, to be sure, but it's not wrong. The good news here is that nobody is likely to say the same thing about Wallace's tennis writing, which has been collected into a single volume by the Library of America. "String Theory: David Foster Wallace on Tennis" hits store shelves next week.

If you're a tennis fan, you've undoubtedly read Wallace's heralded 2006 New York Times piece, "Federer as Religious Experience" (a.k.a., "Federer Both Flesh and Not"). He coined the phrase "Federer Moments" and memorably captured what it's like to witness one on TV: "I don't know what-all sounds were involved," he wrote, "but my spouse says she hurried in and there was popcorn all over the couch and I was down on one knee and my eyeballs looked like novelty-shop eyeballs."

That's enough said about that. It's a great piece -- a classic. You know this already. Read it again to remind yourself.

What you might not know is that Wallace's love letter to Roger Federer is not necessarily the best piece he ever wrote about tennis. The four other contenders join the Federer essay in the 138-page "String Theory," taking readers from the 2006 Wimbledon final to the lower levels of the professional game and beyond.

Wallace played on the Midwest Juniors circuit as a teen; his love for and knowledge of tennis rivaled anyone who's ever written about the sport. The way he picks apart what it is and what it takes to play tennis at a high level is a beautiful thing: profound and moving and insightful.

Which is not to say that the David Foster Wallace who writes about tennis is an entirely different creature than the David Foster Wallace who wrote "Infinite Jest" and the 1987 novel "The Broom of the System." Sometimes he gets too deep inside his analysis, and it twirls into a mental Rube Goldberg contraption. "[A] shot's depth is determined by the height at which the ball passes over the net combined with some integrated function of pace and spin, with the ball's height over the netitself determined by the player's body position, grip on the racket, degree of backswing, angle of racket face, and that interval in which the ball is actually on the strings," he wrote. OK, that's all true enough, but the thing is, he's barely cleared his throat here in his description of a typical tennis shot.

That said, his excesses are somehow more bearable -- and more enjoyable -- in his tennis writing than in his fiction, perhaps because in the next paragraph, when he finally gets there, he's likely going to showcase his truest gift: straight-up descriptive reportage. Here's a snippet from "Tennis Player Michael Joyce's Professional Artistry as a Paradigm of Certain Stuff About Choice, Freedom, Limitation, Joy, Grotesquerie and Human Completeness":

"Many of these players in the 'Qualies,' or qualifying rounds, have girlfriends in tow, sloppily beautiful European girls with sandals and patched jeans and leather backpacks, girlfriends who set up cloth lawnchairs and sun themselves next to their players' practice courts. Most of the girlfriends have something indefinable about them that suggests extremely wealthy parents whom the girls are trying to piss off by hooking up with an obscure professional tennis player."

This perfectly captures the subculture of low-level professional tennis, a fishbowl existence where the players are on the outside of the bowl looking in at the big stars they want to be. It must be pointed out that the last sentence of the quote above is actually a footnote in Wallace's essay. Everyone who's read Wallace knows how much he loved footnotes, and his fans find his use of them charming and even thrilling. And they are fun -- for a while. Then they become oppressive. The reader feels obliged to read them as the little numbers come along, to keep the footnotes in context. But that just breaks up Wallace's rhythm, bringing his fast-moving narrative to a jarring stop, time and again. It becomes exhausting and, ultimately, aggravating. What's most frustrating about his footnote fetish is that the best of his notes fit quite organically into the body of the text, as the above example shows. And most of the ones that don't fit could be jettisoned entirely without lessening the whole.

Wallace also captures tennis' biggest stars with the most incisive of sketches, and they stay with you -- because they're so perfect. "[Pete] Sampras always wears light-blue shorts that sweat through every place but his jockstrap," he wrote, "which looks funny and kind of endearing, like he's an incontinent child -- Sampras is surprisingly childlike and cute on the court, in person, in contrast to [Andre] Agassi, who's about as cute as a Port Authority whore." (This was written in 1996, before Agassi had matured and transformed himself into the beloved "Baseline Buddha.")

Wallace, who died in 2008 at 46, was writing about the professional game right when equipment and fitness advances were making traditional serve-and-volley tennis impossible. The so-called "power baseline" style had taken over top-level tennis by the late 1990s, and Wallace, for the most part, was not happy about it. His arguments remain valid a couple of decades later, especially for those who favor Federer's flair over Novak Djokovic and Rafael Nadal's repetitive approach. "The power-baseline game itself has been compared to Metal or Grunge," Wallace wrote (in a footnote, of course). "What a top P.B.er really resembles is film of the old Soviet Union putting down a rebellion. It's awesome, but brutally so, with a grinding, faceless quality about its power that renders that power curiously dull and empty."

"String Theory" expertly articulates why tennis fans love the sport so, capturing both the human drudgery behind its mastery and, for those who make it to the world-class level, its otherworldliness. While there are a few uninteresting sentences in this slim book, there are no uninteresting pages. Every single one of them stands as a monument to Wallace's talent -- and his dedication to the game.

-- Douglas Perry