Back in 1996, David Foster Wallace wrote an essay for Esquire entitled "The String Theory." Like all of Wallace's work, it said very little and took a long time to do so. People frequently mistake this unchecked self-indulgence for some sort of Joycean profundity, a misconception that Wallace apparently finds hilarious, to the extent that he wrote an entire epic novel, Infinite Jest, on the subject of how David Foster Wallace has nothing to say. In "The String Theory," he analyzes the game of tennis, sounding alternately like a J.D. Salinger character and a macroeconomics textbook. Wallace likes tennis almost as much as he likes footnotes, which is a great deal, I can assure you. The sport has been a prominent, though not always comprehensible, theme in many of his writings. Here, he calls it the "most beautiful" sport, which is probably a defensible statement, as well as the "most demanding," which is probably not.

Since I've disliked Wallace's writing for quite a while, I read "The String Theory" for the first time just yesterday, in a misguided attempt to pump myself up for the imminent French Open. I've known people, intelligent people worthy of affection and respect, who adore tennis. Indeed, there are a decent number of people out there who don't care a bit about any sport except tennis. Some of them play it, and some of them don't, but they're addicted fans, as obsessive as any Red Sox freak or Packers cheesehead. There is something more cultish, and slightly sinister, about the tennis nuts, though. Their brotherhood is truly international, overcoming the barriers of language with the universality of angles, just like the Freemasons. When pressed, they will calmly state the superiority of tennis to all other sports as unassailable doctrine, but they generally display little interest in actually converting you. They like their closed society. The game chooses its acolytes, not the other way around. And it is the game, foremost, that they serve. They root for players, of course, but it's the rough beauty, the deceptive simplicity, the, yes, perfection of the sport itself that binds them.

I don't dislike tennis, which may come as a surprise to some readers. Still, divine geometry or no, I find it difficult to develop an emotional attachment to a sport whose stars tend to have the spoiled, sullen look of prep-school dropouts. Come to think of it, this phenomenon is surely related to David Foster Wallace's irritating chronic Holden Caulfield impersonation, but frankly I'd rather not delve too deeply into Wallace's psyche, at least not quite yet. Suffice it to say that he concludes his essay by speculating as to whether or not the particular player he's been profiling, 22-year-old Michael Joyce, is a virgin. It is difficult not to get the impression that Wallace rarely has a thought he doesn't print, and even more rarely prints a thought worth having.

Needless to say, "The String Theory" did not achieve the desired effect of getting me excited about the French Open. It mostly got me excited about hating David Foster Wallace, as is probably evident. Nevertheless, I expect I'll watch some of it. Martina Navratilova is playing a woman 28 years her junior in the first round, the Williams sisters remain hands-down the greatest sibling rivalry in all of sports history, and rooting against Andre Agassi remains good fun after all these years. Hell, even Wallace hates Agassi, going so far as to compare him to the devil, and to call his then-girlfriend Brooke Shields "not sexy." Then again, Wallace seems to have a certain contempt for all the players, even the ones he professes to admire most. To him they are grotesques, and he uses the word himself. His tone as he describes them shifts constantly from jealousy to belittlement and back again like a jilted lover's drunken email. "The String Theory," in the end, isn't even about tennis, but rather about Wallace's lost tennis career, and his sadness at discovering his unworthiness to even step on a court with the pros. He was an excellent player as a teenager, and now as he sees up close the near-miraculous athletic feats of these world-class players, he both envies them and wants them to envy him, to mourn the sacrifices that made them what they are.

I don't doubt that David Foster Wallace loves tennis, and he obviously knows plenty about it. Similarly, I don't doubt that he loves words, and knows them well. Infinite Jest isn't a bad book because it's badly written, but because it's written for the wrong reasons, about characters the author doesn't care about, for readers he thinks are beneath him. His nonfiction, if "The String Theory" can be called that, suffers from much the same problem. Wallace's players are automatons with interchangeably simple, unblinkingly single-minded personalities. Their only life is on the court, where they sparkle with variety, from the flourish on a backswing to the spin on a serve return. He is unable, or unwilling, to attempt to go beneath their formidable physical surface, arguing that there's really nothing there. They gave up their humanity to become godlike machines. I don't know whether Wallace is trying to fool us or himself. On some level, he seems to genuinely believe that characters, whether real or fictional, are unimportant. Perhaps he does speak for an inner circle of tennis fans, who live for the sublimity of the game itself, unencumbered by dramatis personae, but I'm skeptical. Sports are interesting because they're played by human beings, who have made sacrifices, certainly, but have not sold their souls. "This article is about Michael Joyce and the realities of the tour, not me." Wallace writes. I wonder if he believes that.