Odd, Odd Case of Bobby Fischer

By JANET MASLIN
NYT Book Review

ENDGAME: Bobby Fischer’s Remarkable Rise and Fall — From America’s Brightest Prodigy to the Edge of Madness
By Frank Brady
Illustrated. 402 pages. Crown. $25.99.

It’s no exaggeration to call Bobby Fischer both one of the most admired and one of the most reviled figures in American history. The admiration is prompted by his precocious rise to the pinnacle of the chess-playing world and his galvanizing 1972 cold-war-era triumph over Boris Spassky, the Soviet champion. The vilification stems from the monstrousness he exhibited in later years. On Sept. 11, 2001, he told a radio interviewer, “Yes, well, this is all wonderful news,” and, “It’s time to finish off the U.S. once and for all.” Thanks to the Internet, those comments will live forever.

A man of such extremes is no easy subject for biographical study. For one thing, the many Fischer outrages and eccentricities could too easily be sensationalized. For another, Fischer’s story cannot be told without detailed attention to chess. But Frank Brady, who knew Fischer for many years and is “internationally recognized,” according to the jacket copy of his new book, “Endgame,” as “the person most knowledgeable about the life and career of Bobby Fischer,” seems unusually well qualified to capture his many facets and contradictions. He has the wisdom to recognize that genius would not be genius if it could be easily explained.

“Endgame” is a rapt, intimate book, greatly helped by its author’s long acquaintance with Fischer, who died in 2008, and his deep grounding in the world of chess. Mr. Brady was the founding editor of Chess Life, the official magazine of the United States Chess Federation, but his book is entirely accessible to readers who have never heard of that publication. Nor does “Endgame” require any prior knowledge of chess luminaries, chess strategies (no charts here) or chess tournament etiquette. It requires no expertise to appreciate a one-liner like the one the 19-year-old Fischer delivered after a visit to a brothel in Curaçao. “Chess is better,” Fischer said.

Mr. Brady, a biographer dangerously drawn to megalomania (he has also written books about Aristotle Onassis and Orson Welles), takes a demystifying approach to Fischer’s eccentricities. He sees the person behind the bluster, and he presents that person in a reasonably realistic light. Mr. Brady also makes use of unusually good source material, from Fischer’s own unpublished manuscript to 50 years’ worth of his own conversations with Fischer’s associates, mentors and relatives. Note the omission of the word “friends.” Fischer never had them.

(More here.)