by Richard Stern

Fans of Roger Federer and "The Sopranos" had a mixed weekend. Federer had some grand moments, his off-and-on speed, high- and-low spin and flat shots to Nadal's backhand threw the indominitable Majorcan for as close to a loop as we've seen, and there were enough surprising, ungettable backhands and forehands to give our beloved Federer 16 break points and the second set; but the Nadal-wall did not come down, and at crucial points, the 21 year old hit beautiful passing and drop shots which with the heat brought down the great champion ("mi amigo Roger," said the gracious winner) once again, battu sur la terre battue de Roland Garros. At night, the final, beautfully surprising end to the marvelous long television drama, "The Sopranos." For those of us lusting for revenge, Phil Leotardi was gunned down in front of his wife and small grandchildren and, for horror- frisson, their SUV's tire rolled over Grandpa's white head. For those of us who need ends tied up à la Flaubert, we had visits to the mindless Uncle Junior, comatose Syl, and that human smorgasbord, Janice. For those looking ahead, we learned that Meadow, influenced by seeing her daddy manhandled by the FBI, would become a civil rights attorney and that A.J., saved from suicide and tempted away from enlisiting in the army by a job in Carmine's movie production company, would not go on reciting the gloomy line from Yeats' (pronounced to rhyme with Pete's) "Second Coming." The episode was filled with characters watching television shows and listening to rap and other songs, these popular shapers of attitudes and narrative expectations. Then David Chase planted characters and shots which in such narratives suggested some of the melodramatic conclusions many of us thought we wanted, so that the last 15 minutes were full of tension. (Was that fellow in a cap going to blast Tony's head off?) The final moments saw Meadow having trouble parking, then rushing off to join her parents and A.J. at the restaurant, her face full of the anxiety of being late but for us, the Sopranos-trained audience, another suggestion of some ultimate catastrophe. And then, blackout. It was over. Like the Sopranos themselves, their audience would live in the vaguely troubling suspension of more or less ordinary life. David Chase, like a very few novelists at their very best, had devised a conclusion whose closure was not a form of collapse but of questioning, of the forced reexamination of the whole. A beautiful triumph.