The Second Stretch

I see why Infinite Summer chose this pacing for the book. The second stretch took a lot longer than was scheduled because we added a new member to our book club (yay!). Some of my thoughts below were synthesized in conversation with them. I think this made me pause to reflect much more on what I’m getting out of this book. Although some pages can be quite difficult to read (either for their winding style or for their heavy emotional content), I ultimately didn’t want to put this book down. Which is sometimes not even true of books that are clearer in their writing style.

What follows are my observations until p. 168 of the book (17%). Also, the pacing is starting to break down, because it doesn’t seem like these markers align across the physical and digital versions of this book. In fact, it doesn’t even align across different Kindle versions!

Family

Undoubtedly we are meant to see Hal’s condition from many different perspectives: the global political state (discussed below), his family, the city around him, his peers, etc. In this stage, I found the discussion of his family particularly interesting. We had a glimpse of the odd relationship he may have with Uncle Charles (C.T.) in the opening scenes of the book, where Hal’s uncle vehemently defends his behavior at the University of Arizona interview. The other clear indication I had that family may be a central theme in this novel is this passage from the first stage (when Hal is speaking with a “therapist,” who ends up being his father in disguise):

I’m ten for Pete’s sake. I think maybe your appointment calendar’s squares got juggled. I’m the potentially gifted ten-year-old tennis and lexical prodigy whose mom’s a continental mover and shaker in the prescriptive grammar academic world and whose dad’s a towering figure in optical and avant-garde film circles and single-handedly founded the Enfield Tennis Academy but drinks Wild Turkey at like 5:00 a.m. and pitches over sideways during dawn drills, on the courts, some days, and some days presents with delusions about people’s mouths moving but nothing coming out.

Siblings

We’re introduced to Hal’s siblings, Mario and Orin. I love the way that these characters are set up for an easy compare-and-contrast analysis. Mario is much less intellectually inclined than Hal, and at first, I felt bad for him. Many people take advantage of him because he seems to be gullible. But, when we see Mario with Gerhardt Schtitt (the head coach at the tennis academy), I realized what Mario brings to the table. Their fun friendship is endearing, because Mario listens to Schtitt and is a rare emotional outlet for him. Even though Mario doesn’t bring the traditional currency of utility (athleticism) to the tennis academy, he is a fixture around the school.

Orin is more unsettling. The way he speaks with Hal is cryptic and loaded, telling him “[his] head is filled with things to say.” I didn’t know what to make of this in the first stage of reading, but now we get more of Orin’s story. He seems to have an odd relationship with Avril, his mother, that is simultaneously obsessive and terrifying. He seems to be connected to this entire Canadian separatist storyline, which also includes Avril.

Hal’s relationships with his two oddball brothers is especially interesting. He is tolerant and patient with Mario, showcasing a more tender side than I would have expected. Orin is his older brother, and his apparent inability to cope with life despite being a professional athlete (presumably the goal of many tennis academy students) is probably sobering to Hal. It’s also worth noting that there is probably some tension between Mario and Orin, because when Hal is talking to Orin, he tells Mario that he wouldn’t know who’s on the other end of the line.

Parents

We get more of a glimpse into Avril’s life in this stage. First of all, one connection I made only while writing this blog post is that Avril likely had an affair with the medical attaché that we met. She was quite influential in the academic world, but due to her separatist ties developed in graduate school, she couldn’t get a visa into the United States. She has a child (Orin) with James (Hal’s dad) to get around this. My interest in her character is particularly piqued, but we don’t get much else.

Instead, we get a deeper portrait of James. His father was a competitive junior tennis player (what’s with everyone being competitive junior players but not professional ones? It’s almost as though these are two different sports) and an actor. James similarly was good at tennis and also studied optical physics. He was also an artist, making bleeding-edge films. I couldn’t quite understand whether he was good or bad at filmmaking. How do we get from this rather sober and flattering depiction of James to the version that disguised himself as a therapist to get some secrets out of Hal?

We also see a weird scene with James and his father, James Sr., which I also discuss more below. James Sr. is trying to get James to focus more on playing tennis, and he reminisces on his father (Mario Sr.) and his apparent disappointment in James Sr., who suffered a knee injury and couldn’t play anymore. The cyclical nature of their names and the recurring themes of prodigal talent and pressure are apparent in this conversation.

Politics

Perhaps this is the biggest mystery driving continued interest in the novel. What happened to Canada? What are the separatists in favor of separating from? The acronyms defining the political landscape of this novel are truly infinite (haha) in number. There is the Organization of North American Nations (O.N.A.N.), which seems to be the main conglomeration of nations that we care about.

We start with Rémy Marathe, a member of Assassins Fateuils Rolents (A.F.R.). First of all, I’m surprised the idea of wheelchair assassins hasn’t been picked up for some kind of movie, because I think that would be very cool and fun to watch. Rémy is a triple (maybe quadruple?) agent between the A.F.R. and the Office of Unspecified Services (O.U.S.), which seems to be the traditional government structures we know (C.I.A., Secret Service, etc). He was supposed to pretend to betray the A.F.R. (i.e., triple agent), but now he seems to be sharing real information (i.e., quadruple agent). His true loyalty is ambiguous, but his motivation is clear: he wants medical care for his wife. In some ways, the effort he has to go through to get this care reminds me of the convoluted American healthcare system.

We are introduced to Rémy in his meeting with Hugh Steeply, who works for the O.U.S. I’m not sure what to make of his cross-dressing disguise as journalist Helen Steeply…in the one scene we saw so far, it doesn’t appear that he is genderqueer, but who knows what is to come. Given the later reference to blackface, the charitable reading is that his character is a satire on disguise, and the less generous one is that DFW was wildly politically incorrect. Disguise aside, Hugh seems pretty simple, he doesn’t have any bouncing affiliations.

From their conversation, we are to see a connection to Hal and his family. In particular, the Entertainment that they are discussing seems to have been made by James (because they rumor that the filmmaker’s promiscuous wife was originally from Quebec).

The Surreal and the Mundane

The juxtaposition of the surreal and the mundane was very striking to me. Amid the slow reveal of an apparent political plot with various colorful players, we are treated to mundane scenes reminiscent of a bildungsroman: commiseration in the locker room, the fumblings of young love, brothers teasing each other. These are interspersed with surreal and absurdist images: the guru on top of the water cooler, Rémy and Hugh’s meeting in the desert, Orin’s neurotic visions and tendencies.

Perhaps where this was strongest was the conversation between James and James Sr. (i.e., between Hal’s father and grandfather). What begins as a rather innocuous setting where James Sr. wants to take James to play tennis spirals into a pages-long monologue on James Sr.’s life.

Favorite Quotes

One of the positives to being visibly damaged is that people can sometimes forget you’re there, even when they’re interfacing with you. You almost get to eavesdrop. It’s almost like they’re like: If nobody’s really in there, there’s nothing to be shy about.

Tennis

continuum of infinities of possible move and response, Cantorian and beautiful because infoliating, contained, this diagnate infinity of infinities of choice and execution, mathematically uncontrolled but humanly contained, bounded by the talent and imagination of self and opponent, bent in on itself by the containing boundaries of skill and imagination that brought one player finally down, that kept both from winning, that made it, finally, a game, these boundaries of self.

By learning, in palestra, the virtues that pay off directly in competitive games, the well-disciplined boy begins assembling the more abstract, gratification-delaying skills necessary for being a ‘team player’ in a larger arena: the even more subtly diffracted moral chaos of full-service citizenship in a State.

The true opponent, the enfolding boundary, is the player himself. Always and only the self out there, on court, to be met, fought, brought to the table to hammer out terms. The competing boy on the net’s other side: he is not the foe: he is more the partner in the dance. He is the what is the word excuse or occasion for meeting the self. As you are his occasion. Tennis’s beauty’s infinite roots are self-competitive. You compete with your own limits to transcend the self in imagination and execution. Disappear inside the game: break through limits: transcend: improve: win. Which is why tennis is an essentially tragic enterprise, to improve and grow as a serious junior, with ambitions. You seek to vanquish and transcend the limited self whose limits make the game possible in the first place. It is tragic and sad and chaotic and lovely. All life is the same, as citizens of the human State: the animating limits are within, to be killed and mourned, over and over again.

Miscellaneous

‘What if sometimes there is no choice about what to love? What if the temple comes to Mohammed? What if you just love?without deciding? You just do: you see her and in that instant are lost to sober account-keeping and cannot choose but to love?’

He’s like a baby. Everything he sees hits him and sinks without bubbles. He just sits there. I want to be like that. Able to just sit all quiet and pull life toward me, one forehead at a time.

Good old traditional audio-only phone conversations allowed you to presume that the person on the other end was paying complete attention to you while also permitting you not to have to pay anything even close to complete attention to her.

But that’s not the way I… that’s not the way a real player plays. With respect and due effort and care for every point. You want to be great, near-great, you give every ball everything. And then some. You concede nothing. Even against loxes. You play right up to your limit and then pass your limit and look back at your former limit and wave a hankie at it, embarking.