New Orleans Review, January 2015
"While the title piece, “Federer Both Flesh and Not” represents Wallace at his non-fictive best, making this reviewer feel the literary equivalent of what Wallace himself calls “Federer Moments” (Read it. You just have to read it.), there are also pieces that lack that inexplicable brilliance in some way or another. Not that it makes these lesser pieces terrible, but the works assembled here span the entirety of his professional writing life, some coming out while he was in graduate school, when he hadn’t fully encapsulated the nuances of his irony. Or otherwise he reaches into territory outside of his literary comfort zone. The prime example, used by other reviewers as well, is “Back in New Fire,” a brief essay about the AIDS epidemic, where Wallace asserts that this terrible plague might have some advantage, that “it could well be the salvation of sexuality in the 1990’s.” He says this in terms of the value of impediments to love. Without dragons to slay, or in lieu of social mores, AIDS is that generational fire that a person has to get through to find love. And I see what he’s getting at. In fact, “Back in New Fire” reminds me of the sort of post-post-modern sincerity that Wallace writes about in so many of his other works. Only he’s writing this in 1996. Maybe he hadn’t quite figured it out yet."