In this, Wallace argues: “Tennis is the most beautiful sport there is, and also the most demanding. Mike Miley, a member of the David Foster Wallace Society, who graciously agreed to do a deep read on my outrageously silly question, wrote: “Basically, he thinks tennis is so great because it is intellectually/mathematically and aesthetically beautiful.” Miley dug up a quote from Wallace’s 1996 Esquire essay on onetime super-prospect Michael Joyce that perhaps best exemplifies the author’s steadfast faith in the sport’s ability to serve as a prism for virtuous existence. It’s like listening to a drunken savant at the end of the bar during a Saturday Wimbledon broadcast. One of the most surprising things about reading Infinite Jest for the first time is how, rather than encountering expository outcroppings or any semblance of storyline development, you instead find yourself consuming a whole lot of words about the subtle mechanical nuances of lob strokes-slowly drowning in Wallace’s zonked-out, navel-gazing tennis bliss. I generally agree with Boswell’s sentiment. The main character is Hal Incandenza, a teenage semi-prodigy in the sport, and Wallace uses Hal’s journey to the higher tiers of competition as an extended, elliptical metaphor to riff on everything the author felt passionate about: mindful existence, the psychotic drudgery of sustained excellence, reading really long books, and so on. And Infinite Jest, for the uninitiated, takes place primarily in an amateur tennis academy-a fact that always seems odd when you put it next to the novel’s aureate, bro-canon reputation. We now live in a world of pickleball influencers and pickleball leagues, a fact that has upset a whole lot of recreational tennis (and basketball) players as the pickleballers take up permanent residence on their courts. Pickleball has become extremely popular in the U.S. It emphasizes underhand strokes, requires limited agility, and is generally more approachable and casual in vibe-downright friendly compared with its racket/paddle brethren. Pickleball, for the uninitiated, is a hybrid of tennis and badminton that is played on a bisected tennis court.

The Drowning Eyes by Emily Foster