Maslin Watch: Flashy Grandmasters

Mr. Fischer's behavior also jibes with another observation included here: "The chess mentality offers rich pastures in which psychoanalysts may safely graze." Mr. Fischer once expressed interest in building a house in the upright, cylindrical shape of a rook.

Usually, I suspect, when someone suggests "rich pastures" for psychoanalysts, they have something a little subtler in mind than obvious dick jokes. But on to Janet's review of Bobby Fischer Goes to War (which I actually praised a few months back in the pages of Publishers Weekly, a review you can find on Amazon and which has ended up blurbed on the back of the dust jacket, I see).

She starts off well enough, identifying what made David Edmonds and John Eidinow's Wittgenstein's Poker work: "They created an ever-inflating social, psychological and historical context for this confrontation until the dispute legitimately assumed epic proportions." She suggests they apply this same literary tactic to the Fischer/Spassky match. Never mind for now that the event had epic proportions even before the first move was made; she's right in pointing out how the book expands from a report on a single chess match to a brief on the state of the Cold War in the early 1970s.

But then she takes issue with how they tell the story:

Mr. Edmonds and Mr. Eidinow sometimes show signs of strain. They explain Timothy Leary and LSD to anyone from another planet who happens to be reading this book...They remind readers that Watergate, the Vietnam War and the Pentagon Papers made Americans welcome chess wars as a distraction. They even explain the nature of vengeful behavior as it relates to warring Mafiosi in Sicily.

I don't see this as a serious problem, though, for the simple reason that unlike Janet Maslin, I don't have any memories of Fischer/Spassky. I was two years old when they played; other potential readers of the book weren't even born yet and while they may have heard about Vietnam and Watergate in school, maybe even the Pentagon Papers and Timothy Leary, they probably didn't learn anything about the public chess craze of the time, so it's worth setting up the context. (I forget how the warring Mafiosi fit in, but I imagine it was a legitimate colorful parallel of some psychological tendency.)

Her snapshots of the book's portrayal of its two leads are synopsis and quotes, but that's fine. And the remarks about how the two authors depict Iceland are fine, too. But I think she missteps again when she says the book "tries its hardest to amplify the strategic importance of the match." I read it as doing something slightly different: retracing the public's sense of the strategic importance, hyped by an eager media, while effectively underscoring how the two players were hardly ideal representatives of their respective nations.

And then, in a truly bizarre ending, she notes, "Mr. Fischer's favorite American player, the mid-19th-century champion Paul Morphy, toured Europe winning matches, accruing much attention and renown. Like Mr. Fischer, he had his strange side. He was found dead in a bathtub in New Orleans, surrounded by women's shoes." OK, fine, this ties into the opening thesis that the chess world is full of guys with sexual hangups of one sort or another, but does it actually add anything to our understanding of the book? No. Not only that, the emphasis on what passes for kinky at the Times ignores the book's real psychological depth, which is substantial. Ignoring the potential insights found in the FBI files on Fischer's mother, which Edmonds and Eidinow discuss at some length, strikes me as a rather embarassing omission, especially if you choose to leave it out to have room for a pseudo-salacious anecdote about somebody who has nothing to do with the main story.

Overall grade: mixed. The missteps are serious, but they don't entirely tank what was shaping up as an okay review.