William Skidelsky's positive review of the String Theory tennis essay collection in the Guardian from the end of last month, String Theory: David Foster Wallace on Tennis review – the best writer on the game ever:
[...]Read together, these pieces demonstrate a few things. One is that Wallace’s grasp of tennis was truly prodigious. The analytical powers that must have ended up hindering him as a player made him a peerless observer of the sport. He has often been described as the best tennis writer of all time, and these essays don’t disabuse that notion. Wallace is interested in – and understands – every aspect of the game, from its strategic complications and technical evolution through to sponsorship deals and methods of hydration. In itself, of course, such knowledge isn’t exceptional. But where Wallace stands apart is that he is never boring with it. One of the marvels of his writing is the way it combines a nerd’s outlook with a novelist’s gift for exposition. And so when you read, say, the third essay in this book – a 12,000-word screed on the long-forgotten American journeyman Michael Joyce – you don’t begrudge the need to break off from the narrative to take in a half-page footnote on the politics of players’ appearance fees.
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