Cover Story / Chess in Popular Culture
Books with chess themes have exploded in popularity too, mostly forming more modern depictions of the player. Few current readers would want to endure hundreds of pages about the agony of a tournament-length chess game. (Could Ulysses be published today? If you want to know how much action is required to satiate the modern audience in a one- day period, witness the television series 24.) Just in the past ten years, more than a dozen titles have either used chess as a plot tool or focused exclusively on the game. Non-fiction works include Tim Crothers’
The Queen of Katwe, Mutesi’s pull- yourself-up-by-your bootstraps story with chess as the vehicle that gives an impoverished girl’s world color and opportunity. Michael Weinreb’s The Kings of New York is a year in the life of Edward R. Murrow High School’s chess team. The “oddballs and geniuses” who are depicted are the cool jocks of the school. Weinreb’s details of the players— computer hacking, park hustling, girl chasing and egos conflicting—highlight the further distance the game has moved from the tired cliché of chess players as awkward introverts. The Chess Artist is J.C. Hallman’s personal foray into the competitive chess world—he weaves a tapestry of high-stakes tourna ment with the players who play them, while also bringing more excitement to a time scramble than anyone else. Paul Hoffman’s King’s Gambit differs in that it is also a memoir, and better defines the inner struggle that chess players have with remaining competitive and quitting altogether. Like Hallman, erudite grand masters are brought to life, and foreign intrigue (this time Libya instead of Hallman’s Kalmykia) make the case for the game’s colorfulness and excitement. Chess’ place in history is also being examined more closely as of late. Just
as authors will still be able to write a book about the Civil War hundreds of years from now, so it also goes for chess. Stretch ing back a few millennia, Birth of the Chess Queen by Marilyn Yalom juxtaposes the rise of the power of the anthropomorphic queen with actual queens who were sovereign heads of
“I have been the coolest person in the room and the lamest person. It just depends on who is in the room!”
state. The Immortal Game by David Shenk is a broader retro spective on the game’s birth and advance across empires, and repre sents the most complete history since the oft-cited A History of Chess by H.J.R. Murray, written exactly 100 years ago. Focusing only on more recent times and satiating the general public’s fascination
with the Cold War, Bobby Fischer Goes to War by Dave Edmonds and John Eidinow examines KBG files to flesh out more of the 1972 match with Boris Spassky (the closest thing chess has to a Gettysburg). The second-place public
fascination is probably the Kasparov versus computer matches. Famed statistical blogger Nate Silver’s recent The Signal and the Noise covers the grandmaster’s ill-fated 1997 loss, revealing that the stunning 8. Nxe6! in game six was more of a fluke than was first reported. Mega-selling author Malcolm Gladwell also could not resist getting in on the pop-chess action. His Outliers grouped grandmasters with The Beatles in an attempt to show the hard work necessary for mastery. The game has also seen a renaissance in the
world of fiction literature. Katherine Neville’s The Eight (1988) was the standard bearer for many years, with protagonist Cat Velis coming out of her shell (she goes from wanting to work at her office job even on New Year’s Eve to traipsing around Algeria in search of lost treasure). The intricate plot parallels a chess game, and some of the same dramatic license was taken in last year’s A Partial History of Lost Causes by Jennifer DuBois (like Hallman, a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop—what are they teaching over there?). The main female character, Irina, is much bolder from the outset (but she is faced with a terminal disease instead of Velis’ ennui). DuBois also draws heavily on the current state of Russian politics, with the chess game as a metaphor for political intracta bility. The Yiddish Policeman’s Union by Michael Chabon and The Luneberg Variation by Paolo Maurensig both further the chess mystery motif with the actual moves and position providing a pivotal clue in the whodunit. Breaking Dawn, the fourth book by Stephenie Meyer in the Twilight series, uses a chess theme in its cover art. The author explained that she wanted to show the protagonist’s evolution from pawn to queen (the book sold 1.3 million copies in the first 24 hours of its release).
Facing page, top: The January 21, 1961 cover of The New Yorker showing chess players in a bar or coffee house. Robert Kraus/The New Yorker. Bottom: The Muppet Show Deluxe Collector’s Chess Set, TM & ©Henson. This page: Cartoon from the March 13, 1989 issue of The New Yorker, William Steig/
cartoonbank.com.
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