Tuesday Recommends: Giri Nathan

Hello again. Happy Labor Day. I took August off from blogging, without announcement, but I’m back for September. I’m also struggling through a really frustrating bout of chronic running fatigue, which has me a bit stir crazy. I have some ideas for blogs this month about the US political and social climate between 1848 and 1851 and the weird comfort of reading epistolary novels like Dracula, but nothing of any substance yet, really. I wrote a short essay for work about memory that I may cross-post here, but I want to be transparent about my laziness: That one will be a punt. I’m hesitant to wade into the Sally Rooney discourse, but I am considering a re-read of DH Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which is soon to be a presumably bad new TV show.

In the meantime, it’s the US Open, and while I don’t follow tennis very much, I’m a big fan of Giri Nathan, who covers the sport, and other sports, and occasionally books, for Defector. Here’s his excellent NY Mag piece on Novak Djokovic, and if you happen to attend the Open at any point, check out his profile of Naomi Osaka in the official program.

Every tennis writer has to operate in the probably annoying shadow of David Foster Wallace, whose essays tend to navigate a broad study of the sport itself, perhaps in service of a traditional coming-of-age story (“Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley”) or in order to highlight the value or meaning of athletics as entertainment (“Roger Federer as a Religious Exprience”). Or something, I dunno, there was always a million things going on in those essays, so don’t tweet at me1 about how I’ve wildly misinterpreted things here.

Giri Nathan, at least to me, does an outstanding job carving out his own voice in tennis writing, making a sport that’s a bit of a cultural oxymoron (it’s somehow both distinctly niche and undeniably a part of cultural consciousness) accessible to its wide, but diverse audience.

Of course, Wallace has been dead for 13 years, and both tennis and writing about tennis have changed. Nathan has addressed subjects like gender pay equity and race in the sport with a rigor that Wallace, at least to my knowledge, never did. But if I can make a (again, probably annoying) comparison, both Nathan and Wallace write about tennis in a way that makes it clear that they are both passionately connected to the sport, and expert spectators of it. A lot of cultural commentary today is valued for its range and diversity, and while neither of these writers lacks range, it’s a real treat to read someone operating in his wheelhouse.

I don’t really have one of those wheelhouses, but I’ll be back soon with a real post. Until then, enjoy Giri’s work, watch a little tennis, and don’t do a lick of work on Monday.