"The Queen's Gambit" Declined

With twelve-year-old Judith Polgar's recent success* at the Hastings tournament, the premise of The Queen's Gambit, by Walter Tevis, is not so far-fetched today as it was when it first appeared in 1983. In it, a thirteen-year-old girl by the name of Elizabeth Harmon wins the state championship of Kentucky. A few years later, she takes a page from Bobby Fischer's book and wins the U.S. Closed Championship with a perfect score.

If that were the full extent of the plot to this novel, I for one would find no fault with it, however incredible a story it may seem. Where the author errs, in my opinion, is by trying to embellish this main line variation with distracting subvariations of drugs, alcohol, and sex. It is almost as if he resigned himself from the outset to the notion that no one in America would ever be interested in reading a novel exclusively about chess; hence, the subplots.

And it is these subplots, obviously intended by Mr. Tevis to render young Beth a more believable character by making her someone beyond a mere chessplayer, that in the final analysis have the opposite effect. For instance, is the reader really to believe that an eight-year-old girl at an orphanage could literally overdose on downers? Even more prodigious a feat than Beth's phenomenal chessplaying is her ability to consume alcohol, when she isn't popping pills. On one such lost weekend at the age of eighteen, Beth imbibes "a case of Paul Masson burgundy, four bottles of Gordon's gin and a bottle of Martini & Rossi vermouth," not to mention the four Gibsons she drank at a restaurant. Add to that an occasional marijuana joint, and the reader is confronted with a girl who has a real dependency problem. One is tempted to say that, while Beth may not play chess like a fish, she certainly drinks like one! The end result of all these non-chessic subplots is that Beth becomes a composite character with a touch of the ludicrous about her, like a photograph from a booth at the amusement park where one person's head has been superimposed incongruously above someone else's torso.

And what, I ask, is the significance of the profane language which begins as early as the second page and continues throughout the book? Is it supposed to make the story more realistic? Furthermore, does the fact that Beth begins menstruating for the first time during her decisive victory in the Kentucky State Championship symbolize her attaining maturity through a literary rite of passage? Or is this scene, like the profanity, thrown in only for its shock value? These questions remain unanswered in my mind.

Then, too, there are the chessic errors. Black's sixth move in the Levenfish variation of the Sicilian is given as P-B4, clearly an impossibility. Worse still, his second move is described as P-Q4 rather than P-Q3. And instead of the King's Gambit, it is referred to at one point as King's Gambit, as though King were the surname of some 19th century romantic player who invented the opening. And when Beth disdains book moves in favor of improvisation or tries to win all her games with middlegame tactics because she abhors the endgame, is this really the mind-set of a chess prodigy? Or are we witnessing instead the thoughts of a Class C player such as Mr. Tevis is?

Now that I have said everything negative that there is to say, I have one more question to ask. Why, in spite of all this, did I start reading The Queen's Gambit one day at noon and not stop until I had completed it, even postponing my dinner by about two hours in the process? That question I can answer. The chess plot is riveting. When Beth is playing world champion Vasily Borgov in the Soviet Union at the book's end, I was so caught up in the excitement by then that I felt as if I were playing the game myself. Page by page, I found myself sweating out the technical difficulties of an adjourned position. I'll give Mr. Tevis credit for this: he captures the emotional side of a chess game perfectly. When Beth suffers a crushing defeat or two, earlier in the book, the reader feels with her the utter devastation of her failure. And as she progresses, winning more and more frequently, the sense of intellectual gratification which the reader shares with Beth is cathartic.

I recall that when The Queen's Gambit was published, one book critic deemed it the second-best novel about chess, behind only Nabokov's The Defense. My evaluation of the book is more measured. I consider it only half the novel that The Defense is, since Nabokov's work is devoted almost entirely to chess while Mr. Tevis spends close to fifty percent of his time on tangents. However, in all fairness, it should be pointed out that Nabokov had the advantage of writing for a Russian public that understood and loved the royal game, to begin with. On the other hand, Mr. Tevis addresses an American audience that is largely ignorant of and unsympathetic toward chess. When looked at from this point of view, the fact that The Queen's Gambit contains so much chess drama is no inconsiderable accomplishment.

*{This book review originally appeared in Atlantic Chess News in 1990}