★★★★★ | Literary Fiction | Digital | Borrow | StoryGraph | Goodreads
I loved everything about this book. Who knew it was possible to write a novel filled with intricate chess games and make them exciting?! Consider this:
She steeled herself, kept her eyes from his face, and played the best chess she knew, developing her pieces, defending everywhere, watching every opportunity for an opened file, a clear diagonal, a doubled pawn, a potential fork or pin or hurdle or skewer.
My eyes misted when Benny and his friends called Beth in her hotel room with frantic advice for beating Borgov. Here she was, an orphan girl all alone in Russia, playing this grown up man’s game, in a grown up man’s world, while her adversary huddled with other grown men to beat her, and who should call but her nerdy, lovable friend.
But, of course, this book is really not about chess. It’s about an orphan girl desperate for love, for kindness, for a mother’s and especially a father’s love. She loves Mrs. Wheatley but in a transactional way, but mourns her when she dies, which she sees as an another abandonment. The closest she comes to a father’s love is from cranky, gruff Mr. Shaibel, who she learns after his death that he loved her as a father. Mr. Wheatley, her uncaring adopted father, breaks her heart again and again. And Borgov, the ultimate mean father figure. His embrace at the conclusion of the novel startles and delights her. She stops to play chess in the Russian park with an old man, another father figure, but this time in a healing way.
A review in the New Yorker writes this:
“Do I have to care about chess?” people would ask when I recommended the novel. I promised them that anyone who has ever felt lost, rejected, or underestimated while nurturing a fierce, mute hope that something residing deep within them might somehow save their life would love this book.
Yes, this is true. There is an underdog vibe here with Beth that pulled me in.
Drug addiction and alcoholism are a big part of the story. I don’t quite buy the way in which Beth gets sober. Call a friend, workout, gut it out. Maybe. Maybe.
I learned as the credits appeared on my Kindle that Walter Tevis also wrote The Hustler and The Color of Money. Two books about playing pool. I’m obviously going to read those as well.
It’s also the third book I’ve read this year with orphan protagonist (David Copperfield by Charles Dickens and Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver).