Win or Die in the Attempt
The saga as it's told
Every tennis academy needs a ghost story, and Enfield's is a boy who kept a loaded gun at his own temple and won everything. Eric Clipperton reaches the reader almost entirely as a story other people tell, most fully inside the puppet-film Mario screens on Interdependence Day, where the book calls him "some sort of human radon" (scene 086, p. 407) — a kid who rose from nowhere onto the East Coast junior circuit and lent the cliche "Win or Die in the Attempt" (scene 086, p. 407) a grotesquely literal sense. He carried a blond-wood case among his gear — "a velvet gun-shaped concavity inside where the Glock 17 lay nestled in plush velvet" (scene 086, p. 407) — and brought it onto the court with his towels and sticks to make plain "his intention to blow his own brains out publicly, right there on court, if he should lose, ever, even once" (scene 086, p. 407). The legend's origin is told as a set-piece: down a break to a high seed named Ross Reat, Clipperton sits at the changeover, assembles the gun, "Caresses his left temple with the thing's blunt shiny barrel" (scene 086, p. 408), climbs the umpire's chair to announce his terms, and then "plays tennis with the Glock 17 held steadily to his left temple" (scene 086, p. 408) for the rest of a match his opponent has already stopped trying to win.
The paradox
The threat works because no one is willing to call it. Draw after draw, the boys unlucky enough to face him form what the tour comes to call "the Clipperton Brigade" (scene 086, p. 408), players who "declined to be the player to cause Clipperton to eliminate his own map for keeps" (scene 086, p. 408) over something as small as a tournament round. A strange arithmetic settles over his results: "A win over Clipperton had no meaning because a loss to Clipperton had no meaning" (scene 086, p. 408). He "wins the whole tournament by what is essentially psychic default" (scene 086, p. 409), collects the trophy, and vanishes. And the paradox the book keeps pressing is that the very tactic that makes him unbeatable also makes him unreal. He accumulates a mantel of hardware, but "he had no official ranking whatsoever" (scene 089, p. 430); the governing body regards him as "never having had a legitimate victory, or even a legit match, in sanctioned play" (scene 089, p. 431). He is the unranked number one — a champion who cannot be competed against, and therefore, in the only ledger that counts to him, does not exist.
Mario, and the kindness
The one person who treats Clipperton as though he exists is the least competitive figure in the book. "His only even remote friend on the jr. tour is eight-year-old Mario Incandenza" (scene 086, p. 409); everyone else's manner toward him is the "stiffly conspicuous nonrecognition that e.g. accompanies farts at formal functions" (scene 086, p. 410). Through Mario, Clipperton reaches James Incandenza, and here the saga turns on one of the book's quietest gracenotes. When Subsidized Time arrives, a new computer-manager who does not know enough not to logs Clipperton's championships as real, and the boy finally surfaces in the rankings, "ranked #1 in Boys' Continental 18-and-Unders" (scene 089, p. 431). He has gotten the one thing he has been "burning over and holding himself hostage for all along, a real and sanctioned #1" (scene 089, p. 431). A few days later he appears at the E.T.A. gate in a terrible way, and Incandenza — who "has a very low melting-point of compassion for traumas connected with early success" (scene 089, p. 432) — lets him in over the staff's objections for a few private minutes of counsel. It is in that room, in front of the two Incandenzas, that Clipperton "blows his legitimated brains out for real and all time" (scene 089, p. 433). Incandenza takes Mario to "the first of his life's two funerals so far" (scene 089, p. 433), the phrasing quietly counting forward to Himself's own. The kindness and the catastrophe are the same gesture: the one adult who would not turn Clipperton away is the one who has to watch him die.
The myth institutionalized
What the academy does with the story afterward is where Clipperton stops being a person and becomes curriculum. The Clipperton-versus-Reat match is retold to every incoming class — it is "Struck who sort of specializes in this story and never misses a chance to tell new E.T.A.s the tale of Clipperton v. Reat" (scene 086, p. 408) — and the room where he died is kept as a shrine in reverse. Mario cleans it himself the night of the suicide ("It took the bradykinetic Mario all night and two bottles of Ajax Plus to clean the room," scene 089, p. 433), and "the finally spotless room in question had been locked ever since" (scene 089, p. 434). Years later it still carries "a glued picture of Ross Reat pretending to kiss Clipperton's ring at the net" (scene 154, p. 759). Schtitt keeps the only key, and when a junior whinges too loudly about some hardship he is sent to "go chill for a bit in the Clipperton Suite, to maybe meditate on some of the other ways to succeed besides votaried self-transcendence and gut-sucking-in and hard daily slogging toward a distant goal you can then maybe, if you get there, live with" (scene 089, p. 434). The story is treated as scripture: Schtitt recites it to a journalist as doctrine, telling her that "the children here are versed in what is called the saga of Eric Clipperton" (scene 130, p. 680). The deepest sign of how far the myth has sunk into the school is grammatical — the name has become a common noun and a verb. To quit everything and die inside is, in the students' idiom, to have done "a Clipperton" (scene n321, p. 1065); Pemulis, cornered by the administration, fears that confessing would be "tantamount to Clippertonizing himself" (scene n332, p. 1074).
What Clipperton is for
Clipperton belongs to a small, grim species in this book: the talented who are destroyed not by failing but by succeeding. He is the purest case, but not the only one. The film pairs him with a boy from Fresno who won a big title and drank cyanide-laced Quik that same night — an "unprepared-goal-attaintment-trauma" (scene 091, p. 437) so complete it takes his whole family down after him, and it stands as the in-world reason academies are required to keep a counselor on staff. What both cases dramatize is Schtitt's warning, delivered as flat doctrine from the bleachers: that "attaining the goal does not complete or redeem you" (scene 130, p. 680), and that "We see suicides in history by people at these pinnacles" (scene 130, p. 680). The book's fuller argument about why winning devours its winners — the difference between playing to win and playing not to lose, the fame that feeds a hunger it is built never to satisfy — is developed elsewhere. Clipperton's function is narrower and sharper. He is what the goal looks like when it is the only thing holding a person up: a boy who could exit the cage he had built for himself only by firing the gun that made it. The academy keeps his suite locked and his name in circulation for the same reason it keeps a counselor on payroll — as a standing warning that "certain very talented jr. players who just cannot keep the lip stiff and fires stoked if they ever finally do achieve a top ranking" (scene 091, p. 436) are the very ones the whole regimen is quietly built to save.
Sources
This essay is anchored throughout in the novel's own pages, cited inline by scene and page: the saga as told inside Mario's Interdependence-Day film (scenes 086, 091), its final act at the E.T.A. gate (scene 089), and its afterlife in Schtitt's counsel (scene 130), in Mario's later walk past the locked suite (scene 154), and in the two endnotes where the name has become common speech (scenes n321, n332). The larger arguments this essay deliberately leaves to one side live elsewhere in the archive: the academy's whole doctrine of discipline, the machine, and the price of the Show is set out in the body and tennis, and the novel's account of how winning, fame, and attention consume the self is set out in entertainment and the self. The event-by-event record the essay compresses lives on Clipperton's character page.