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Walter Tevis, The Queen’s Gambit
Dec. 28th, 2020 12:27 amMy older sister taught me to play chess, and promptly quit playing me after I started beating her. I ran out of people in my highly constrained social environment who were willing to play against me, and gave it up. A few years later, my friend I. showed me the bookstore her dad ran, which was a small bookstore, general stock, in west Seattle, but which also had a specialty in chess, because her dad was into it. He was — and remains — an absolutely wonderful human being, but nothing about any of that re-inspired me to take up chess. I had an extremely modest interest in following AI efforts relating to chess (and Go, and similar). Extremely. Modest. Mostly, I figured that chess was going to lose to machines once machines could make breadth first search techniques work well enough. And as near as I could tell by my limited reading on the topic, that was more or less how things turned out.
Of course, when you read chess games, they are their own choreographed awesomeness. And that is the peg that Tevis has hung his narrative on. There are some other elements. Our Chess Prodigy is American (pretty implausible), a girl whose parents died in relatively rapid succession and then she wound up in an orphanage, where she finds the janitor playing chess in the basement and pressures him into teaching her how to play. It’s really a wonder to read that section — one does NOT expect things to turn out as well as they did.
It’s an orphanage, and it is in the late 50s / very early 60s, so the kids are being tranked routinely (with their vitamins, it is like Tevis had just read One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest or something); this becomes a bit of a problem for our young chess prodigy.
Oh, and Beth’s best friend at the orphanage, Jolene, is a beautiful black girl who graduates and goes to college and is quite ambitious. She does not reappear after Beth is adopted until Beth needs someone to rescue her from her spiraling problem with booze and pills and no physical activity.
So, adding that all up: we have a mid 80s novel, set a couple decades earlier, about a girl chess prodigy, orphaned, adopted, with a magical negro bestie from the orphanage who pops back into the narrative to whip her into good enough physical shape to survive the sitting for hours at a time while playing chess. Beth does it all pretty much on her own, even giving the finger to the Christian Crusade, but even tho her chess/fuck buddies are left behind in the States as a result, they follow her career and call her up at the last minute with helpful analysis.
Oh and the old guys in the Moscow park playing really high quality chess.
I mean, it’s like Harry Potter, almost. It’s a romp. Based on R.’s description of the Netflix adaptation, it sounds like the adaptation is wicked faithful. If you can cope with the tropes, it is a bunch of fun and a fast read. As you can imagine, based on my first paragraph or two, I have zero opinion whatsoever about the quality of the game playing described or the realism of the descriptions — I basically treated them like I treat a lot of the really detailed descriptions of space battles in milSF, which is to say, okay, you have some sort of narrative point, and that is? Gotcha, moving on now! I’m sure _actual_ chess aficionados had all kinds of Issues then and now.
It will be interesting to hear what people think at book group.
ETA:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/23/books/walter-tevis-novelist-queens-gambit-netflix.html
This suggests quite strongly that many of the passages that _feel_ like they were written by someone who lived through them probably were quite autobiographical — the narcotics, meeting up with an old friend and reconnecting strongly, feeling disconnected from everyone, the Ohio and Kentucky settings.
Of course, when you read chess games, they are their own choreographed awesomeness. And that is the peg that Tevis has hung his narrative on. There are some other elements. Our Chess Prodigy is American (pretty implausible), a girl whose parents died in relatively rapid succession and then she wound up in an orphanage, where she finds the janitor playing chess in the basement and pressures him into teaching her how to play. It’s really a wonder to read that section — one does NOT expect things to turn out as well as they did.
It’s an orphanage, and it is in the late 50s / very early 60s, so the kids are being tranked routinely (with their vitamins, it is like Tevis had just read One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest or something); this becomes a bit of a problem for our young chess prodigy.
Oh, and Beth’s best friend at the orphanage, Jolene, is a beautiful black girl who graduates and goes to college and is quite ambitious. She does not reappear after Beth is adopted until Beth needs someone to rescue her from her spiraling problem with booze and pills and no physical activity.
So, adding that all up: we have a mid 80s novel, set a couple decades earlier, about a girl chess prodigy, orphaned, adopted, with a magical negro bestie from the orphanage who pops back into the narrative to whip her into good enough physical shape to survive the sitting for hours at a time while playing chess. Beth does it all pretty much on her own, even giving the finger to the Christian Crusade, but even tho her chess/fuck buddies are left behind in the States as a result, they follow her career and call her up at the last minute with helpful analysis.
Oh and the old guys in the Moscow park playing really high quality chess.
I mean, it’s like Harry Potter, almost. It’s a romp. Based on R.’s description of the Netflix adaptation, it sounds like the adaptation is wicked faithful. If you can cope with the tropes, it is a bunch of fun and a fast read. As you can imagine, based on my first paragraph or two, I have zero opinion whatsoever about the quality of the game playing described or the realism of the descriptions — I basically treated them like I treat a lot of the really detailed descriptions of space battles in milSF, which is to say, okay, you have some sort of narrative point, and that is? Gotcha, moving on now! I’m sure _actual_ chess aficionados had all kinds of Issues then and now.
It will be interesting to hear what people think at book group.
ETA:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/23/books/walter-tevis-novelist-queens-gambit-netflix.html
This suggests quite strongly that many of the passages that _feel_ like they were written by someone who lived through them probably were quite autobiographical — the narcotics, meeting up with an old friend and reconnecting strongly, feeling disconnected from everyone, the Ohio and Kentucky settings.
