The Queen's Gambit

[Spoiler alert for book and series] Read this along with watching part of the Netflix series. It was interesting to see what was changed and not changed in the film. On the one hand, many parts were extremely faithful to the book, with word for word dialogue. On the other, there were many small and large changes that significantly altered the emotional trajectory. In the book, Beth is not in the car when her mother crashes it and dies (on purpose, the movie suggests), and there is much less backstory of her traumatic childhood. Beth grudgingly agrees to her adoptive mother taking a 10% commission on her chess earnings, whereas in the film she raises it to 15% with a warm smile. To the film was added a suggestion that Beth's genius may be close to madness. Subtracted was an unnecessary sexual overture by a character who makes more sense without it. And so on.

Overall, I preferred this approach. It expands the human side of the story, while de-emphasizing the chess moves that take up a lot of space in the book and are pure gobbledegook to those of us who do not play chess. Other readers seem to feel differently, but for me there is simply not a ton of human interest in whether somebody is going to come up with the right chess move. There is nothing to relate to for normal non-chess-playing humans.

This makes the final face-off with Borkov anticlimactic, for me. I'm not interested in who moves what piece where. The real “endgame” took place when Beth put away her wine bottles and reconnected with Jolene, facing her past and reconceiving her priorities. The mental gymnastics of chess are astounding, amazing, but human beings can't live without human, emotional connection. And it was the last-minute call from Benny that gave Beth a necessary dose of that.

After Borkov's surprising hug at the end, it would have been nice to see some more interaction between them, or between her and the Russians. That would have been interesting to me. I've not finished the series yet, so I wonder if they picked up on this.

The series made more of Beth as an addict than the book. In the book, she goes through spells of using tranquilizers and/or alcohol, but she seems relatively able to free herself from them with some mental effort. I don't think it's so easy in the real world of substance dependency, especially for a person with so much trauma in her life. In general, the book left me feeling rather flat and disappointed, with Beth as a more robot-like chess whiz and less of a human being.

I wanted to finish this novel. The narrator, Amy Landon, has a soothing voice, and understood Beth's emotional remove from others and what that might sound like. The author, Walter Tevis, has given us other important American stories turned into landmark films such as The Hustler, The Color of Money, and The Man Who Fell to Earth. 

But.

I truly believe you need to understand chess to follow this novel's progression. Many of Beth's plays, and tournaments' rules and activities, are given without any explanation, which is frustrating. Plus, there is so much alcohol abuse, without it pressing forward the story. Both Beth and her mother drink beer like mother, often in physically impossible quantities and in a method of communication with each other and with other people. I am not sensitive to alcohol abuse or alcoholism per se, but even I became very uncomfortable with the frequency of it. I became so hyperaware of it that it took me out of the book.