Recently, a few friends and I decided to break ground on an Infinite Jest book club, because there is something comforting about being obnoxious and imperious within the safety of good company. We have so far made it a third of the way through David Foster Wallace’s notoriously overbearing second novel, and every week the group gathers on a Slack channel—called, yes, “Infinite Besties,” complete with a custom reaction emoji of that one close-up of DFW’s expressionless, headband-wreathed face—to break down our impressions.* These conversations have been fruitful and wide-ranging, achieving a loose, bacchanalian feel that is only possible when you possess no fear of sounding stupid when talking about literature. Recurring topics include the book’s compelling advocacy for the brave act of living, the questionable narrative ethics of 11-page-long footnotes, and, most intensely, whether or not David Foster Wallace would’ve hated pickleball.
Pickleball, for the uninitiated, is a hybrid of tennis and badminton that is played on a bisected tennis court. 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 has become extremely popular in the U.S. over the past few years. 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. 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. 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.
Wallace himself was a ranked tennis prospect as a teenager, and after Infinite Jest became a phenomenon, magazines started contracting him to write about tennis things, like Roger Federer—elevating DFW to something akin to the sport’s poet laureate. So, the rise of pickleball, and its intersection with the broader national context of tennis, seems as if it would’ve been a prime DFW hook for a juicy feature for Harper’s, if the author hadn’t died by suicide in 2008. The more my book club reads of Infinite Jest, the more we’re devastated the man never had the chance to weigh in.
My reading group (four men, three women, for what it’s worth) is split into two camps on the vexing Wallace-and-pickleball question. One holds the classical belief that the author would fundamentally despise this hideous mutation of tennis, because pickleball is inherently an enfeebled interpretation of a sport Wallace leverages as his aesthetic and emotional true north, a conceit laced throughout the entirety of a 1,000-page novel. The argument goes that Wallace has always possessed an understated conservative instinct, and if such a person finds untold eldritch repulsion in contemplating cruise ships and lobster season—two topics psychically aligned via incurious yuppieness, rotten Americana, and the earth-destroying compulsion to consume at all costs—then surely a junior-varsity tennis facsimile colonizing YMCA courts and occupying the minds of retirees would evoke the exact same reaction.
“For all his cool postmodern élan and tech savvy, there was something old-fashioned and fuddy-duddy about him, from his militant grammarian instincts to his courtly manners,” agrees Marshall Boswell, a professor of English at Rhodes College and author of Understanding David Foster Wallace, when I sent him an email entitled “Interview with Slate about DFW and pickleball.”
“I can absolutely see Wallace writing a dense, hilarious, and probably scathing account of the pickleball phenomenon, complete with footnotes and a sidebar detailing the vast physical and even quantum distinctions between tennis and pickleball, with differential equations and graphs and the whole shebang,” continues Boswell. “That article would also probably include a withering portrait of the demographic who play pickleball and why.”
I generally agree with Boswell’s sentiment. 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. It’s like listening to a drunken savant at the end of the bar during a Saturday Wimbledon broadcast. 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. In this, Wallace argues: “Tennis is the most beautiful sport there is, and also the most demanding. It requires body control, hand-eye coordination, quickness, flat-out speed, endurance, and that strange mix of caution and abandon we call courage.” Pickleball is popular specifically for its undemanding nature. Seems likely that Wallace would judge it, and find it wanting.
And yet there is a smaller sect of our reading group that maintains that Wallace would have totally evolved into a massive pickleball booster by 2023, for reasons that are entirely extratextual. Here’s the case. Wallace would be 61 years old if he were alive today. He’d most likely be gloriously rich, mostly retired, and probably living in, say, Palo Alto, California, or Portland, Oregon, or any of the other white-collar crucibles for the sport. His knees and hips would be eroded by the decades, and his politics might (unfortunately) have long since curdled into canceled-guy grievance. This is the part where I need to mention that Wallace has been accused of some shocking abuse by his onetime romantic partner, poet Mary Karr, and since his death, more stories of manipulation and bad behavior have emerged. There’s a zero percent chance he would have escaped the #MeToo reckoning of the past few years unscathed.
But maybe, in this hypothetical embittered boomer era, Wallace would also cease to cherish tennis as a sanctified blood sport, a battle against one’s own human limits, and might indulge in some of the more social benefits of a nice day outside, playing a sport almost anyone can play. In this timeline, he’d embrace pickleball as a fun thing to do—a joy he so rarely offered himself in the heat of his thinking career—and the pickleball turn would cause a genuine “Dylan goes electric”–style meltdown among DFW dead-enders.
Boswell, of course, rejects this premise with gusto.
“Wallace, for reasons that might be coded into his very DNA, [would not have lived] to be the guy in his 60s who was able to mellow out and be more forgiving. The very lifeblood of his art was its intense and unforgiving depiction of what he calls in one of the short stories in Oblivion, ‘the nightmare of consciousness,’ ” Boswell says. “Had he stayed with us, I think he would have viewed pickleball as an activity he wished he had it in him to enjoy, but for reasons of wiring, could not.”
In fact, Boswell can think of only one pathway where Wallace might have caught a glimpse of pickleball’s dignity. Toward the end of his hypothetical gonzo magazine takedown of the trend, after he was finished analyzing the sport’s precise aerodynamic properties and the hateful qualities of the attendees and associated foodstuffs, perhaps Wallace would brandish a pickleball racket himself, and find the ritual to be “benign and beautiful,” causing him to appreciate what Boswell calls “the sense of innocent community and play the game has fostered among people who might otherwise be spending six figures a year to play racquetball, squash or, worst of all, golf.” Yes, Wallace would still be locked in his intellectual prison—cursed by the densely layered, hypnotizing metatext of it all—but at least he wouldn’t be spiraling downward. Frankly, you could make the argument that one of the overarching themes that dominate DFW’s work is a desperate plea for lobotomization—and (apologies!) that’s something pickleball offers.
Miley echoes this point but theorizes that, at the end of the day, Wallace likely wouldn’t find pickleball rich enough to evoke any strong opinions whatsoever. Miley believes that the author could’ve likely identified some moderately self-improving elements of the game—the scaffolding for a typically lengthy Wallaceian digression—but nothing that would capture his attention for long. “I don’t think hate would really enter into it, but neither would love or unqualified approval. Indifference may be the most likely,” he says.
Of course, there is no right answer to this question. Both Miley and Boswell are correct in their own way. One of the great traditions of an Infinite Jest close read is to ruminate on all of the different ways the book’s ideas can be cast forward into the present day. Wallace’s thoughts and manias can easily be retrofitted to comment on the attention economy, the nationalist realignment, smartphones, esoteric drugs, the omnipresence of therapy-speak, the fallacies of emotional recovery, and so on. I hope the pickleball debate also becomes a fixture of future DFW scholarship. If we could ever answer this question objectively—if we could know exactly how the author felt about this insurgent rise of False Tennis—perhaps all of his other indelible mysteries would finally fall into place.
Correction, April 24, 2023: This article originally misstated that Infinite Jest was David Foster Wallace’s debut novel. It was his second novel.
