The Kings of New York by Michael Weinreb

The book opens with a young chess player called Norman, whose black winter cap, "coupled with his tics and twitches and grimaces and the plaintive noises he emits through his bulbous lips, lends him the appearance of a burglar trying to make an escape through a narrow shaft". The chess world is indeed populated by "geeks and oddballs" - although also by people as worldly, articulate and charismatic as Garry Kasparov - and Michael Weinreb well captures their sheer weirdness. It proves both a strength and a weakness of his entertaining book.

This tells the story of a radical educational experiment, the Edward R Murrow High School in an underprivileged area of Brooklyn, where pupils can develop their own "independent projects and individualised curricula" (or even skip classes altogether). Since a maths teacher called Eliot Weiss happened to be a chess fanatic, he decided to start a club, which soon began to field one of the best teams in the country. Weiss tirelessly sought funding and photo opportunities, took his charges all over the US to compete and "thereby transformed an after-school club into a national dynasty. He had done as much for the reputation of a single public high school as any teacher in New York, and he had done it all for free."

Weinreb spent a year with the players, from the beginners' induction session in September to Murrow's third successive championship triumph. Among the most cheering moments are those when they manage to beat a team from one of the rich elite high schools whose pupils are bound to end up running the country.

The account is excellent on character and atmosphere, the chess hustlers in Washington Square, the seedy itinerant chess tutors, the competitors at chess tournaments - "a Goth wearing a trench coat and purple lipstick... a boy wearing a Burger King crown ... a boy with a Lincolnesque beard carrying a stuffed sheep" - who seem to come straight from Bizarro High School. Bumper stickers read HONK IF YOU UNDERSTAND EN PASSANT. "Witty" team names include Wepawns of Mass Destruction and Rock Out With Your Rook Out.

One of the subtexts is the decline of the old Soviet Union, where early on chess was declared a "socialist sport" and even the man who translated Bobby Fischer's 60 Memorable Games became a household name. Several of Weiss's stars grew up in that world before moving to a country where bank tellers make more money than chess professionals and a player can win a brilliant game and then walk out on to a street "where no one gives a goddamn about the silence and order contained within those sixty-four squares". Spelling bees and even hot-dog-eating competitions get more television coverage than chess tournaments. The game may be character-building or good mental training, but in America there is something absurdly or heroically pointless about a passion for chess.

Most of Weinreb's "heroes" are morose adolescent boys whom he describes with a kind of bemused fascination. Nobody was sure, he writes grandly of one, whether his "constant wise-cracking reeks of self-importance or self-flagellation or some improbable combination of the two". Their conversations are invariably brief and formulaic: an argument about whether there are ducks on the artificial river in the glitzy hotel which is hosting the national championships ends with the exchange: "You're retarded." "Whatever." We may often be amused by their dysfunctional geekiness, but we never really get to know or care about them as individuals.

Even odder and more irritating is Weinreb's attitude to the game itself. It is possible, if unlikely, that someone might read this book as a human-interest story even if they didn't know how the horsey moves or, as is helpfully explained at one point, that "the queen is the most powerful piece on the chessboard". Unsure about the level of knowledge he should assume, Weinreb veers wildly from the utterly elementary to the fairly sophisticated, sprinkling it all with false notes and a number of blatant errors.

Of one typical encounter we read: "He plays fast, and shifts all his pieces to the queen's side of the board, and Willy, playing an opening called the closed Sicilian... attacks from the king's side, and before you know it, in under an hour, the game's over." This is like an account of a war which leaps straight from opening salvo to victory parade and gives no sense at all of the particular, slow but intense, "strange beauty" of chess.

Some of the howlers are almost as gross as misspelling Beethoven in a book about musical prodigies. Yet the laws and basic principles of chess are in themselves no more obscure or nerdy than the offside rule. This is a fine book about obsessives; it is a real pity that their obsession is treated with such careless contempt.