Tennis as literary technique

Abstract

How might a novel play tennis? In a New York Times essay on Roger Federer, David Foster Wallace reflects on how the climactic topspin lob that won Wimbledon for Federer in 2006 was a product of narrative, reliant on a sequence of bluffs, building up to a final unreturnable shot whose genius lay in its ‘unimaginable angle.’ Tennis becomes fiction here, both in the sense that the final shot is unreal and that it is Rafael Nadal’s imagination that is ultimately overwhelmed by Federer's spin. In this essay I consider how Wallace and Vladimir Nabokov’s most tennis-obsessed novels, Infinite Jest and Lolita, achieve the equivalent of tennis’s ‘unimaginable angles’ in their language and form.