Two Questions With John Jeremiah Sullivan

The writer and David Foster Wallace fanboy on revisiting the icon’s tennis fixation

BEFORE HIS DEATH in 2008 at the age of 46, David Foster Wallace was the intellectual’s intellectual. Prolific as both a novelist and journalist, he was able to provide insight into his generation’s condition with enviable precision. He also really, really loved tennis. He wrote about it often, most notably in his magnum opus, Infinite Jest, as well as in Play, the short-lived

New York Times sports magazine, where he profiled Roger Federer in 2006 in what is widely regarded as the best piece of tennis writing ever.

But “Federer as Religious Experience” was only the most famous example of Wallace’s tennis journalism, and to remind fans of the depth of his understanding of the subject, the Library of America compiled all of his tennis nonfiction into a collection. Titled String

Theory after his piece on middling ’90s pro Michael Joyce, the 138-page book, published in May, features an introduction by Wallace disciple John Jeremiah Sullivan, a much-heralded writer of literary nonfiction.

Like Wallace, Sullivan grew up playing and appreciating tennis. In 2006, contractual obligations forced him to pass on writing the Federer piece that would ultimately be assigned to Wallace. Though he surely would have done a fine job, the tennis world is thankful for whatever clause in Sullivan’s contract prevented him from taking the gig.

Newsweek recently caught up with Sullivan to talk about the power of Wallace’s writing and the parallels between the virtuosic novelist and the virtuosic tennis player.

What do you remember about experiencing Wallace’s writing for the first time?

I just remember feeling the power... the way you might feel after you turned on some machine that was a little more powerful than you were ready for. I think that’s what [Jonathan] Franzen means when he talks about Wallace as a great rhetorical writer. The prose was operating at such a high level in every sense.

Did you discover anything new about Wallace as you went through all of his tennis writing?

I [did realize something] in one place very distinctly: his piece on Federer, “Federer as Religious Experience.” I had never really liked it as much as everyone else. I had always felt like there was something I wasn’t getting. I think it was because I loved his piece about Michael Joyce so much, that to me he was rehashing a form that he had done perfectly. So it was good for me to be sent back to it and forced to read it more closely, and one thing that stuck out was how deliberately he was working the metaphor of... i won’t say for Federer as himself—it wasn’t simplistic or tasteless like that—but he was finding this metaphorical connection between a player who was in Federer’s situation and the modern novelist. One is standing in a kind of wind tunnel of speed and spin, and the other is standing in a similar tunnel of information. There was this real, strange kind of empathy there that bounced back and forth between Wallace and Federer in that piece.