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The Queen’s Gambit

by Walter Tevis, 1983

Published: 2021.04.03, Updated: 2021.04.17

Home > Book Reviews > Walter Tevis > The Queen’s Gambit

 

Photo by Wil C. Fry

★★★★ (of 5)

 

Summary

I’d never heard of Walter Tevis before watching the Netflix miniseries The Queen’s Gambit, but he was the writer of the books that inspired memorable films like The Hustler, The Color Of Money, and The Man Who Fell To Earth, starring big names like Paul Newman, Jackie Gleason, Tom Cruise, David Bowie, Rip Torn, Beverly D’Angelo, and Wil Wheaton. The Queen’s Gambit was one of Tevis’s final books, published just a year before he died, and waited nearly 40 years before Netflix turned it into visual media. (I learned after reading that Heath Ledger was supposed to direct a film adaptation starring himself and Elliot Page — then known as Ellen. But Ledger, of course, died.)

The novel tells the story of child chess prodigy Beth Harmon, from when she’s taught to play by an orphanage janitor, through her growing pains and substance abuse, to becoming a chess grandmaster. I would classify it as a coming-of-age story. It’s set in the 1950s and ‘60s, beginning in Kentucky and ending up all over the world.

 

The Good

The writing style is my favorite kind — sparse, crisp, and uncluttered with needless meanderings. This was evident from the opening line:

“Beth learned of her mother’s death from a woman with a clipboard.”

—page 3

(This might be more of a plus for the miniseries than the book, but...) The miniseries followed the book very closely. Since I watched first and read later, I was easily able to visualize the show’s characters as the people in the book — casting was excellent in that Tevis’s descriptions matched what I’d seen on screen (with the obvious exception that Beth Harmon is a redhead in the show but has brown hair in the book). The scenes I still remembered from the miniseries matched the book almost take for take. The differences between the miniseries and the book were few enough that I could keep track of them easily in my head while reading. And none of them were consequential.

Tevis is sparing with descriptive words but still manages to paint a picture with them, and keeps the story moving.

At least one critic chastised Tevis for “insufficient ingenuity in his artificially stylized accounts of chess tournaments”, citing the lack of draws and Tevis’s habit of having Beth meet her strongest opponents in the final round “in the interests of suspense”, which obviously wouldn’t always happen in real life but makes for a more interesting story. Tevis did use a consultant (chess master Bruce Pandolfini, who also consulted for the 2020 miniseries). Based on my limited experience with the game of chess, and a couple of tournaments in the 1990s, I thought the author’s descriptions of chess seemed accurate enough. And he does mention plenty of draws (stalemates) at the tournaments — just not for Beth Harmon.

I like that the author imagined a woman breaking into the world of chess championships in the 1960s — a world that is still very much male-oriented and male-dominated despite many changes and overtures in my lifetime.

Further, I think Tevis very accurately portrayed the inverse correlation between chess skill and social skill (a correlation that doesn’t always apply, of course, but is usually dependable). And he got inside Beth’s head fairly well, especially when it came to alcohol and drug abuse, perhaps due to Tevis’s own experiences.

And I think he found a fairly good balance when it came to actually mentioning chess moves. In every game, he mentions specific moves and openings and defenses, but not so much that it drowns out the story for a person unfamiliar with chess. The book isn’t about chess — it’s about Beth Harmon, and I don’t think you’d need to like or know chess in order to enjoy this book.

 

The Disappointing

Very little was disappointing. I didn’t like one scene at the orphanage (which wasn’t in the miniseries) between Beth and her older friend Jolene. I don’t think I will ever be comfortable reading sex scenes that involve children. But it was just a paragraph or so.

(Updated to add:) On page 8, there’s a scene in which the janitor beats Beth with the quick checkmate known as “Scholar’s Mate”. That is perfectly reasonable and happens to many young players when they first learn the game. However, there is a huge time mistake in this scene. The author says the game starts when Beth’s next class is 10 minutes away, and when it ends, she’s 15 minutes late for the class. Which means the game took 25 minutes (let’s say 22 minutes, if it takes a few minutes to walk to class). But Scholar’s Mate is only four moves for white, three for black — a total of seven moves. I think the author would agree with me that this is extremely unlikely. Scholar’s Mate usually occurs in less than 60 seconds. This could have easily been solved in editing by removing the irrelevant mentions of the class’s starting time. Or, Beth could have asked to play it again a few times to learn how to defend against Scholar’s Mate, thus making her late for class.

 

Conclusion

I can’t tell how much I would have liked this if I hadn’t seen the (very well done) miniseries first, but I think I would have. It reads quickly and gets to the point.

 



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