The Opiate,Winter Vol. 24
The Subtle Finesse of The Queen’s Gambit As a Novel vs. a Series Genna Rivieccio
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hile the runaway Netflix hit that is Scott Frank and Allan Scott’s The Queen’s Gambit has remained more faithful than most adaptations to the original it’s based on, it bears noting a number of glaring differences that make Walter Tevis’ book stand out for its nuances. Appropriate, considering that to be truly great at chess, one must recognize that it’s all about the nuances. Seeing the moves and adjustments that only the most skilled and adept can. Alas, if only one could say that about other facets of life—for it’s evident that we’ve all become complacent with crude, slapdash approaches to most everything, the arts included. Upon the book’s release in 1983, reviewer Christopher Lehmann-Haupt (one supposes we must mention he wrote for The New York Times to give his opinion Legitimacy with a capital “L”) touted, “Forget just for a moment that Walter Tevis’ The Queen’s Gambit is a novel about the game of chess—the best one that I know of to be written since Nabokov’s Defense. Consider it as a psych-
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ological thriller, a contest pitting human rationality against the self ’s unconscious urge to wipe out thought.” If this sounds like a slightly more cerebral and erudite version of what you watched on Netflix, you would not be wrong. For the devil is in the details, and since that’s the case, Tevis’ rendering of our heroine, Elizabeth “Beth” Harmon (played by Anya Taylor-Joy in the show) comes across as slightly more complex, especially when juxtaposed against the show’s heavy-handed addition of certain backstories— namely that of her parents. From the very first paragraph, one of the biggest discrepancies is established: Beth’s mother dies in a car accident while her daughter is at home, as opposed to Beth being potential collateral damage in her mother’s need to end it all a.s.a.p. Because of this latter plot detail switch in the show, greater emphasis is placed on where Beth’s self-destructive tendencies—in a direct collision with her brilliance—stem from. Conversely, in the book, her mother’s death is never flashed back to in terms of highlighting her progenitor’s depressive, mad genius
