A couple weeks ago I finished reading The Chess Artist by J.C. Hallman, which was an anniversary present from my wife. We were in a bookstore about a week before our anniversary, and she said, “Pick out any book you want, and I’ll buy it for you.” I found Hallman’s book (originally $25.95) marked down to $6.95, which means that it is being “remaindered” and will probably go out of print soon. It was published in 2003, and somehow snuck past me.
My one-sentence review of The Chess Artist would be “Starts out with a bang but fizzles out.” As a person who has written a book myself, I can see the trap that Hallman fell into. He had an idea that really sounded good on paper, with strong characters and a good story line, and he probably got a contract on that basis. But the deeper he got into the project, the more the characters and the story line started looking like smoke and mirrors. After a while the author started to become disenchanted with his own subject. And so the book just limps to a conclusion, without fulfilling its early promise.
But there are some really good things about The Chess Artist, too — it’s not all dreary by any means. Here are some more particulars.
The “Chess Artist” of the title is Glenn Umstead, one of the strongest black players in America, whom Hallman meets because the two of them work at the same casino in Atlantic City. Hallman, a complete neophyte at chess, is completely overawed by Umstead’s ability and his personality, and starts following him around and soaking up his chess wisdom. For most of the book, the partnership really clicks, Hallman playing the role of Boswell to Umstead’s Samuel Johnson, or Sancho Panza to Umstead’s Don Quixote.
Umstead doesn’t seem to mind having a journalist hovering around him. He says, “Yo, Hallman,” a lot. Hallman seems a little bit star-struck, and perhaps doesn’t do enough to explain to the reader exactly where Umstead is on the chess-player pecking order. Maurice Ashley, the first black grandmaster, gets only a one-sentence mention in the book, when Umstead says he’s disappointed that Ashley got to the GM title first. Hallman leaves the reader with the impression that it was a close race; in fact, Umstead is nowhere near Ashley’s level. He’s exactly like me — a guy who reached his rating peak (2254) in the late 1990s, and has now slid down into the lower expert regions. I think that, as a journalist, Hallman owed the reader a somewhat more objective view of the person he was writing about.
What really makes the book unique and interesting, for chess fans and non-fans alike, is the quixotic journey that Hallman and Umstead go on. For some reason, Hallman takes it into his head to go to Kalmykia, the homeland of Kirsan Ilyumzhinov and not much else, to see the grand Chess City that Ilyumzhinov built there for the chess olympiad. Of course it is no surprise to discover that Ilyumzhinov’s empire built on chess is the ultimate smoke-and-mirrors production. But it’s easy to say that from a distance. It is quite another thing to actually go to the place and take a close-up look, really close up, at the cracked mirrors and the peeling walls.
Hallman somehow persuades Umstead to accompany him on this crazy pilgrimage to the House That Kirsan Built. I think Hallman starts out half-believing in Ilyumzhinov’s mad facade, and Umstead, in classic Quixote fashion, is completely clueless. Somewhere in this story could be the makings of an absolutely wonderful farce, some kind of mash-up of Don Quixote and Gulliver’s Travels, with Sancho and the knight errant traveling to Gulliver’s Laputa and meeting up with the king of the castle in the sky.
It doesn’t quite work, though. Hallman just can’t deliver the goods, though it’s not completely his fault. He and Umstead get only one brief, (Correction posted on 6/5/08; see comment thread for more details.) formal interview with Ilyumzhinov. The interview does go into somewhat bizarre territory — Ilyumzhinov talks about how he wants to make chess into a religion — but it doesn’t bring us much closer to understanding what makes him tick. Also, Hallman goes to Kalmykia with the stated goal of finding out more about the suspicious death (murder?) of one of Ilyumzhinov’s political opponents. He ends up finding out not one single iota of information. No big surprise, really. None of the people he talks to are quite sure who this American journalist is, and there is every reason for them to suspect he is a plant. But I’m just warning the reader — you won’t find any great investigative journalism here. Mostly you get Hallman wandering around the steppes not knowing where he is.
For Umstead, too, the journey ends in disillusionment. He had visions of playing great Russian masters and impressing them with his talent. Instead, he ends up playing a lot of speed chess, one match after another, against Kalmykia’s best seven-year-old player, and losing. Granted that this is not any ordinary seven-year-old, but still… Losing to a seven-year-old, not just once by a lucky fluke but over and over again, is a pretty big comedown for the American master. (Correction posted 6/5/08: Umstead did play a seven-year-old, but the person he kept losing matches to was a teenager. I was confused. See comment thread for more details.) Eventually Umstead just kind of crawls into a shell and wants to go home. Hallman insists on staying longer, hoping to find out anything about the murder, until even his hosts start hinting that it’s time for them to go. The whole trip ends up as a downer. A joke with no punch line, a tale with no climax.
As I said earlier, somewhere in this whole fiasco Hallman starts being disillusioned by chess itself. For me as a chess player, Hallman’s big mistake was that he decided early on that he wasn’t going to try playing serious chess himself. This actually makes a little bit of sense to me as a writer. In journalism school I learned about writing with a “beginner’s mind,” which is desirable because as a beginner you can ask the same sorts of questions that your readers will ask. You also avoid getting too wrapped up in your subject; you can keep a little bit of distance from it, and see it more objectively.
But the choice not to engage chess on its own terms ends up being disastrous for Hallman’s book, because he fundamentally misses out on the soul of chess. He never understands what attracts chess players to the game; he never understands its beauty. He writes a book called The Chess Artist, and yet he has no clue what chess artistry is! Instead he is seduced by the glittering trappings of chess — the bravado of the Chess Artist, the amazing castle in the air built by the Chess King. Once he realizes that these things are only on the surface, he loses faith that chess has any substance at all.
Very sad.
