The Game by Jack London: Themes, Analysis, and Literary Significance

Jack London puts his real-world experience as a sports reporter for the Oakland Herald to use here in his 1905 boxing novel The Game. There are parts of the internet that tell us Gene Tunney, who was the heavyweight champion from 1926 to 1928, retired from boxing altogether after reading this book. We can’t verify its truthfulness but if that’s true, that’s a great detail, and that might make The Game the most influential novel about boxing ever written.

Even at less than 70 pages, The Game is considered Jack London’s fifth novel, and he’s already repeating and overlapping themes from the first four. Like The Sea-Wolf, there are ideas (mostly physical) on What A Real Man Is and like A Daughter of the Snows, it depends pretty heavily on a Strong Female Character. Unlike A Daughter of the Snows, which does a pretty admirable job of creating an action heroine that was ahead of its time, the portrayal of female character in The Game is handled with a whole lot less care and insight.

There is that presumptuous misogyny that was common in media portrayals of women early in the American 20th century here, the first chapter is a lot about how Genevieve can’t possibly understand anything at all the likes of what men go through.

Though sometimes there is a dim-witted sweetness to how Joe talks to Genevieve, it’s kinda bad! The heroine in A Daughter of the Snows was certainly problematic but she was a lot more fully-formed than Genevieve, and this represents a huge step back in how Jack London wrote women. There are scenes where you can almost see the melodramatic acting from those old movies, where the woman throws herself upon a man and collapse into his arms like he’s a fainting couch. It’s downright eye-rolling, the gender stereotypes are truly cringe.

And just for good measure, Jackie’s eugenics leanings is also on display here, with the line “she was one of those wonderful working-class blooms which occasionally appear,” lol I mean wow.

The boxing match, though. The writing here is pretty good! Jack London is at his best when he is describing action and not putting words in a woman’s mouth, and the second half of The Game succeeds on this level. It’s like reading the story board for the fight scenes in Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull or Stanley Kubrick’s Day of The Fight, the literal blow-by-blow. It’s easily the best part of this short book, and London makes reading a boxing match as compelling as many find watching one.

If you can get past all the heteronormative characterizations from the depiction of the romance in the first half of The Game, then the second half is a pretty good read — especially for fans of good sports writing.

Click here to buy The Game by Jack London

We’ve also covered other works of Jack London, including White Fang and Call of the Wild and Iron Heel and The Game and The Sea-Wolf and John Barleycorn and Before Adam and Martin Eden and A Daughter of the Snows and The Cruise of the Dazzler.

Cover Image Credit: Background boxing photo by Geoff Charles circa 1956, per Wikimedia Commons. Photo of Jack London boxing circa 1904 by Charmain London per Wikimedia Commons.

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