“Midwestern life is informed and deformed by wind.”

Wallace grew up in the American Midwest, where the environment influenced both his tennis game and his philosophy. The Midwest is a cipher for the human condition, and the area’s buffeting winds shaped everything, placing Wallace’s tennis game and his worldview in constant tension, eroded by fierce, conflicting pressure blustering in from every direction. Wallace writes about the winds shaping Midwestern life but, by proxy, he is referring to how such environmental forces shaped him as a person.

“So different were our appearances and approaches and general gestalts that we had something of an epic rivalry from ‘74 through ‘77.”

Wallace’s narrative tendencies are evident from an early age. As he reflects on his childhood, he turns a lopsided rivalry against a more talented tennis opponent into a multiyear narrative in which he is the protagonist. Wallace’s rival continued to improve after this point, while Wallace lost interest. Nonetheless, he casts himself as the protagonist in a tennis rivalry that denotes the Midwestern mindset, making the innocuous vital, just as the significance of his seemingly failing tennis game increases because of its context.

“They made no sense. Houses blew not out but in.”

Tornadoes, to Wallace’s young mind, symbolized the incomprehensible. In a very real sense, they were a powerful force of nature outside the boundaries of his comprehension. The tornadoes were a backdrop to the more comprehensible world of tennis, a symbol of the world beyond Wallace’s understanding that instilled fear in his young mind.