The Queen's gambit
1983
- fiction
- chess
- women chess players
- coming of age
- sex
- addiction
- alcoholism
- downers
- russia
- kentucky
The story
Beth Harmon, an orphan by eight years old, is unremarkable. She is plain and she knows it. In the Kentucky orphanage, she hordes the tranquilizers handed to the children daily to quell the ache of dullness and routine. A formidable math student, she is allowed to clean the blackboard erasers in the basement where she find the janitor playing chess daily. He is a sour old man and pays her no mind until she suggests a move he could have made. She learned the basics of the game by watching and he slowly teaches her the intricacies as she earns the right to learn them. Throughout the process her mind races and her dull, plain existence is replaced by the realization of prodigy. By the age of sixteen she is competing, under the new freedom of adoption, for the US Open and is on her way to international stardom if she learns to prioritize her chess, her addictions, and the distractions of youth.
What it’s like
Clean, clipped prose with a cool, observational voice that stays close to a young woman's private thoughts, set in a midcentury America of institutional gray, linoleum corridors, smoky hotel rooms, and the amber pool of a lamp over a chessboard late at night. Chess is rendered as a silent, sensory world: the click of pieces, the hush of tournament halls, the board the mind keeps projecting onto ceilings and walls. The mood is cool and quietly melancholic, flaring into exhilaration when a game clicks into place. Pacing alternates between tight, tense set pieces at the board and long, drifting stretches of loneliness between them. Intensity is moderate: pill and alcohol dependence are handled frankly, without glamour or gore, and there is some sexual content, sharp arguments, and no graphic violence. A guarded, lonely young woman gradually learns to let people in, and her hunger for mastery slowly collides with her need for connection. Suits a slow weekend afternoon, a long train ride, or a quiet evening with a cup of tea. Written for readers who love character studies, period detail, and the drama of focused obsession.
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