Play the Game! — A Closer Reading

A Heroine Who Refuses to Be “Queer”

Honor’s mother worries she is “queer,” but the novel never treats her difference as pathology. Instead, it presents her as a healthy, hearty girl whose instincts are social and romantic. The opening chapter’s argument over schooling reveals a central conflict: Honor’s world is populated by males—cousins, brothers, stepfathers—and she sees no reason to change. The stepfather, Stephen Lorimer, is “incurably boyish,” and Honor grins at him as a peer. The text uses physical details—her “hard brown paws” squeezing her mother’s “lily-of-the-field hands”—to underscore her earthiness. Readers should note how the novel frames Honor’s preferences not as rebellion but as a natural, almost comic mismatch with her mother’s genteel ideals.

The West as a Moral and Emotional Landscape

When Honor returns from Europe, the California landscape triggers an almost physical relief. The “blessed brown, the delicious dryness,” the “jig-saw hills,” and the “sweep and space and freedom” of the West become synonymous with honesty and action. The novel contrasts this with the “stormy scene” with her Italian singing teacher, the Signorina, whose operatic fury and “fat face mottled with temper” feel foreign and theatrical. Honor’s relief at being home is tied to a code of directness: she finds “comfort” in packing trunks, securing tickets, and cabling—tangible steps toward helping Jimsy. The West, for Honor, is where problems are solved by doing, not by talking.

The Ambiguity of “Playing the Game”

The title phrase appears in a letter from Stephen Lorimer: Jimsy “played the game” by refusing to tell a “politic lie” about his expulsion from Stanford. Yet the novel complicates this praise. Carter’s reassuring letter repeats “she must not be anxious” so often that the word “beat itself in upon her brain,” and Honor cables back “Anxious.” The gap between what people say and what they mean becomes a quiet theme. The stepfather’s public defense of Jimsy as “really something of a hero” sits uneasily beside the fact of expulsion. Readers should watch how the novel tests the ideal of “playing the game” against the messy realities of reputation, loyalty, and love.

Action Over Introspection

Honor is “simple and direct” and finds “relief in action.” When she decides to return to Jimsy, she does not agonize; she packs, cables, and sails. The ocean voyage is difficult only because “there was nothing to do.” The novel’s prose mirrors this preference: it moves quickly, favoring dialogue and concrete detail over interior monologue. Even the Signorina’s farewell—“Go with God. Live a little; it is best, perhaps. Then, my good small one, come back to me.”—is a command, not a reflection. This narrative rhythm suggests that Honor’s growth will come through choices and movements, not through prolonged self-analysis. First-time readers should pay attention to what Honor does as the surest guide to her character.

The Pull of Two Worlds

Honor is caught between her mother’s world of Eastern finishing schools and European culture and her stepfather’s Western pragmatism. The novel opens with a school decision and quickly moves to a transatlantic summons. The excerpts show Honor navigating these spheres: she obeys the Signorina’s lessons but rejects her fury; she cables her stepfather but also sends “brief and urgent messages.” The tension is not between right and wrong but between two kinds of loyalty. Readers will find that the novel’s interest lies less in plot twists than in how Honor weighs competing claims—family, love, reputation, and her own stubborn sense of self.

Because the excerpts cover only the opening and a middle section, the full arc of Honor’s story remains unknown. What is clear is that Play the Game! builds its drama around a heroine who acts on instinct and whose choices are framed by a distinctly Western American ethos of directness and loyalty. Readers should attend to the recurring phrase “play the game”—it appears in letters and dialogue, but its meaning shifts depending on who uses it. The novel may reward those who track how Honor’s own understanding of that phrase evolves.