The Queen's Gambit

By Walter Tavis

This book is about so many things. It is about chess. It is about chess in a way that I have never before seen or experienced chess. While I have tinkered with a chess board, I had no idea the complexity of the game. So yes, this book opened my eyes to the reasons people are passionate about chess, how intellectually and emotionally consuming it can be.

But to say the book is ONLY about chess would miss the fullness of its elegance as a story. Because the book is really about its protagonist Beth Harmon and her unlikely journey into the chess world of the 1960’s. Carina Chocano’s review in the New York Times Magazine of the wildly popular Netflix adaptation offers a nice description of the quirky nature of the story itself. Chocano describes the story as “suffused in a gloomy, gothic atmosphere. Certain expectations have been set. Surely fresh disasters lurk around the corner. Instead, one by one, they are averted….you don’t see [each] turn coming, and you don’t quite trust it. Next time, you think, Beth won’t be so lucky. And yet, she almost always is.”

Chocano chose a feminist take on the story. She said, “ At first I assumed that the character of Beth was based on an actual person, but it soon became obvious that this wasn’t the case. The fluidity of her rise and the lack of resistance she encounters on her way to the top gave it away. At this moment, both in politics and the pandemic, in which women have been disproportionately sidelined and burdened, this kind of meritocratic, gender-agnostic fiction is desperately needed. It cheers us up. It reminds us of who we’re supposed to be. It reassures us in the same way that the chessboard - predictable, rule bound, well delimited - makes Beth feel secure and in control.”

I agree with Chocano that the story has a Cinderella quality to it in the well-explained but still sort of magical way Beth experiences her rise to prominence and simultaneous independence from the culture she encounters in the chess world.

Yet, I did not see it as the girl genius success story Chocano describes in her review. I saw it as a story of a broken child. Broken by her mother’s death. Broken by her life of abandonment and neglect in an orphanage. Broken by her own confusion about being safe and being human. A broken child who encounters a mysterious mixture of her own genius and something beyond herself leading into awareness of that genius, and drawing her into a world where she could discover who she was.

The plot turns in Beth’s story may not be the dark or shocking stuff of high drama, but they represent the twists and turns most women encounter in coming of age, prodigy or not. We all are challenged to learn about and discover our own genius in a world which would not even care to look. We are also challenged to enter into a world where we can explore what we know, what we’ve learned, and where we choose to engage.

I watched Beth explore the edges of her primary relationships, experiment with drugs, sex and alcohol, trust and betrayal. I watched a woman find, not necessarily her own success and independence, but her own courage to follow that mystery which continued moving her forward.

There is no denying that in this story the protagonist experiences unlikely success as a woman in a man’s world. If chess were the only measure, Harmon was a winner.

But I hope readers don’t miss the way Tevis shows us how a woman not only found success, but how she encountered and did battle with her demons, her wounds, her healing. It was for her, as life is, a jumble of success and failure, joy and sorrow, sacrifice and reward. She shows us a mixture of courage required to embark on an unknown and mysterious path, and the inexplicable mystery of being led into each step. She experienced healing because of it. Not necessarily because of her success at the game, though that was part of it, but because of her choices to risk, to be vulnerable, to connect, and when to wake up the next day and try again.