The Queen's Gambit - Walter Tevis

I still find it hard to believe that until a few weeks ago I had never heard of Walter Tevis. After all, two of Tevis’s six novels, The Man Who Fell to Earth and The Hustler, were turned into two of the more memorable films from the seventies, and late last year Netflix released a wonderful mini-series based on his 1983 novel The Queen’s Gambit. It didn’t help, I suppose, that Tevis died at the relatively young age of 56 in 1984 or that his body of work consists entirely of six novels and a collection of short stories, but still I wonder how I missed him for so long. 

The Queen’s Gambit is Beth Harmon’s story. Beth spends her childhood years in an orphanage after the tragic death of her mother. If that were not sad enough already, this is the kind of orphanage that feeds tranquilizers to the children every day because that makes them easier for staff to handle. Beth is one of the unfortunate children who develops a lifelong addiction to the pills, and who suffers terribly after the orphanage is forced by authorities to stop illegally drugging it wards. The same pills, however, allow Beth to focus her mind in a dramatic new way, an ability that changes her life after she learns the game of chess from the orphanage janitor, a gruff man who only reluctantly begins to teach her the game after she starts coming  down to the basement to clean classroom erasers. 

Soon enough, eight-year-old Beth is outplaying her chess tutor and anyone else she gets a chance to compete against, including the local high school’s entire chess team - which she defeats in simultaneous matches. Everyone is astounded by the little girl’s talent except the orphanage director, a woman who delights in punishing Beth by refusing to let her play the game. That all changes finally when Beth, at age 13, is adopted. Chess becomes her life, although it is a life she will spend battling her addictions, and in a few years Beth Harmon may just become the most famous chess player not only in the United States, but in the entire world.

With The Queen’s Gambit, Walter Tevis does the seemingly impossible for non-chess players. He makes the life of tournament chess come alive in a way that makes it all as exciting as the Super Bowl, the World Series, or March Madness can be for rabid sports fans. Tevis’s revelations concerning “inside chess,” along with his explanations of the various offenses and defenses used by the masters of the game are fascinating enough. But Tevis tops himself by making his move-by-move descriptions of key matches so interesting that even a non-chess-playing reader ends up holding his breath to see which player will finally be caught in an inescapable trap. 

Bottom Line: The Queen’s Gambit is great fun on several levels. The side story of who Beth Harmon is and how she got to be the young woman she becomes by the end of the novel is both entertaining and, at times, heartbreaking. The chess tournament scenes, dry as the subject may at first sound, are equally fascinating because Tevis begins them with all the preparation, strategy, and gamesmanship involved. But the biggest surprise of all, is that the non-player comes away from The Queen’s Gambit with an above average sense of how how the game really works - and why some people are able to play it a such a high level at such an early age. If you haven’t read this one yet, you need to fix that. It’s really very, very good. 

Walter Tevis