First published in 1983.
Beth, orphaned at 8, is top of her class. She learns chess from the janitor. She can soon play 5 games simultaneously without boards. She hoards sleeping pills so that she can at least sometimes deeply sleep. Jolene, 12, black, feels her up. Beth's caught stealing pills and is banned from playing chess.
When nearly 13 she's adopted by the Wheatleys. She's not played chess (except in her mind) for years. Jolene's still not adopted. Beth misses her. Beth steals money from classmates so she can enter a tournament. During the tournament she has her first period, she find out that Mr Wheatley has left home, and she wins all her games, beating a state champion and winning $100. Mrs Wheatley (who's on tranquilisers) is happy to lie to further Beth's career.
By the time she's 16 she's fancying some of the players, and flying to events each month or so. At 17 she's joint US Open winner, has $3,000, has learnt how to smoke joints and drink, and has lovelessly lost her virginity. At her first international event in Mexico she sees the Russian world champion, Borgov, losing to him. Mrs Wheatley dies while they're at the event. She wins the US Open so she's invited to play in Moscow. She realises she needs a coach. She sleeps with Benny Watts, US Champion, and learns from him. She plays in Paris, where she loses to Borgov again though she play brilliantly. She buys her house off her father for $7k, leaving $2k in the bank. She goes on a drinking binge. For some reason she thinks Jolene can help. Jolene takes her to a gym. A christian (anti-communist) organisation gives her $4k which she returns - strings attached. Benny rejects her. The government help her. After a 5 month break from chess she goes back to her orphanage for the janitor's funeral. He'd kept press cuttings about her. In Moscow she beats Borgov (and his backroom team). Benny had phoned her suggestions.
The writing's purposeful - you can see the reason for each sentence. I used to enter chess tournaments. The descriptions of them (such as they are - there could have been more observation) ring true. The details of games make sense to me and they add a "reality effect" feel to the text, but they're technobabble to non-players. It avoids chess notation - "Then he picked up the black queen bishop pawn and dropped it on queen's bishop three" could nowadays be "He played c6". In her first event I think she'd find it strange writing down the moves and using the clock. "Someone had said that when computers really learned to play chess and played against each one another, White would always win because of the first move. Like tick-tack-toe" (p.130). But is any of that true?
Other reviews
- cannonballreadoverall character development is pretty thin. I was really drawn in to the plot but often felt disappointed by his two-dimensional characters. ... Tevis re-introduces Jolene to save Beth. This part of the book is just preposterous. It isn’t clear why Jolene should give a damn about Beth since that whole relationship is woefully underdeveloped. Moreover Jolene is a weird combination of stereotype and, as a Pajiban on FB noted, a “magical Black person.” Only a white man could make up the nonsense that happens next, including a Black woman and a white woman having lunch together at a fancy restaurant in Kentucky in the 1960s. It’s like Jim Crow and segregation never existed.
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