The ever tightening net

After several previous in-book mentions, the match between Hal and Stice ("The Darkness") came up in Infinite Jest. Was it as exciting as all the build up suggested? Did I get the sense of a psychic imbalance in Hal from the way that he played? 

Not really. 

Honestly, action scenes are difficult to write in a compelling way. The scenes of pure chaos that Wallace wrote for Infinite Jest definitely work, and work well. Part of the reason for the success of these scenes is that they're describing events without rules, unlike an organized and systematized game. Plus, any conflict so bare as a fight or a free-for-all is much easier for the lay reader to follow. 

Thankfully, though, Wallace knew that not everyone who read this book would know as much about tennis as he did himself, and so there are enticing embedded sections throughout the description of the Interdependence Day match. Some of these sections run for a line, others for a paragraph. But what makes them obviously important is that they're about character locations. Taken together, these digressions from the game (aside from the snippets of conversation between Steeply and DeLint) offer a list of who is where while Ortho and Hal play. 

Though one of Steeply's thoughts suggests that the reason that he's at ETA is because it's somehow featured in "the Entertainment." This thought reads thusly: "It was unlikely that any one game figured much in the Entertainment" (658). Maybe this is meant more generally, and a section of "the Entertainment" involves a montage of various games being beautifully played. 

Whatever the case may be, things are starting to gain focus, and that net widely cast over the plot from early on in the book is finally tightening around its target.