Asymmetry

Strangely enough, I find myself writing again about Bill Simmons. I found his latest article interesting, well-thought out, with his conclusions generally supported by his arguments. So why am I writing? Simmons did a great job breaking down film and the problems with the type of statistics used. I took issue with the fact that he concludes this “proves” the lack of predictive power of statistics, when I thought he should have concluded that he used statistical and observational analysis correctly. Simmons missed a golden opportunity to show readers how to synthesize statistics and low-sample number observations.

The setup:  Week 10, Patriots at the Colts, 34-28. The Patriots had the ball on their 28 yard line, 2 min 3 s left to play, and it was 4th-and-2. Belichek decided to go for the first down rather than punting. There might have been some issue with the ball being spotted in the wrong place, but essentially, the Colts stopped the Patriots. Turnover on downs. The Colts scored on their series, after dragging out the clock, and won the game by a point.

First, Simmons does what I like sports writers to do: combine on-the-field observation with the context of what one usually sees from football teams, in the aggregate (i.e. some group analysis, which usually does mean statistical analysis). I happen to think his argument against not-punting, in this specific play, is stronger than, for example,  Joe Posnanski’s and Gregg Easterbrook’s posts about the statistical analyses that generally supported Belichek’s decision. Simmon’s arguments were stronger because he specifically placed his observation of the game and the Patriot’s performance leading up to this last offensive call in the context of aggregate statistics. True to form, however, he followed this by trashing the statistical analysis, rather than concluding that he had properly evaluated singular performance and identified how the Patriots deviated from the aggregate.

Simmon’s argument is that most stat-heads used the wrong set of probabilities. Posnanski,  Easterbrook and Simmons presented the statistical arguments that the Patriots had a greater chance of winning had they gone for the conversion, rather than punting. To be fair, the difference might have been slight; numerically, of course, one probability was higher than the other (Tim Graham of ESPN arriving at a 1.5% win probability). Had Simmons focused on reconciling the statistical assumptions with how Belichek’s play calling lowered the Patriots’ chances of achieving first down, I believe he would have provided a wonderful illustration of how one goes about reconciling statistical/probability estimates with actual events. Unfortunately, Simmons ignores the probability of winning, focuses on the probability of losing, and asserts that  punting was the unequivocal correct call.

Simmons had a contrary opinion from Easterbrook and Posnanski on the punting issue, but all three of them found problems with Belichek’s coaching in the last minutes of play, preceding the 4th down conversion attempt. All three seemed to have pointed out issues with game management (such as 2 timeouts that were called just to make sure the right players were on the field) and with play calling (rushing on first down, passing on the next two downs). That last sequence seemed to have suggested that the call to play out the fourth down rather than punting was a spontaneous call. Simmons broke that down nicely, suggesting that rushing on third down made more sense if one is in fact going for a 4th down conversion. Finally, the actual play on 4th down was atrocious, as the Patriots limited their options drastically, going with an empty backfield. In this formation, there was no running option, and the Colts simply jammed Brady to hurry his throw. As it happens, he connected with Kevin Faulk, but short of first down.

I don’t think anything here contradicts the aggregate story (such as a greater than even chance of getting 2 yards). The fact is, there was much circumstantial evidence that Belichek might have flubbed the play. After all, there are no guarantees; just because the average play nets 5 yards doesn’t mean the players just stand there, waiting for the refs to spot the ball up field. You need to select a play and then execute it. As the saying goes, that’s why they play the game. The players still need to give their fullest effort.

What one should consider is how Belichek reduced the Patriots’ chance of converting by using a bad strategy. And Simmons actually did this. He noted that this play was essentially a 2-point conversion attempt, as both offense and defense were lined up to attack and defend a short field (i.e. defending the end zone with the line of scrimmage at the 2 yard line). There seemed to have been some confusion between the special teams and offense as it wasn’t clear to the players whether they were attempting a punt or not, necessitating a time out that could have been used later to challenge the Faulk bobble (see Posnanski’s post). Simmons presented some stats showing that 2-point conversions had a lower success rate (on the road; I have issues with Simmons’s selective stat picking, but that piece wasn’t exactly a peer-reviewed article.) It was unreasonable to conclude that the Colts would have rolled back down field to score with under 2 minutes to go, possessing only 1 timeout (despite the fact that the Colts did exactly that on their preceding drive. It probably was an aberration and won’t happen again. But a stat here would be nice, comparing how long in distance and time an avg NFL drive is.) The Colts  also had an inexperienced, young receiver corps, which might have increased the Patriots’ chances of stopping the Colts after a punt.)

So, even if the average successful 4th down conversion is around 60%, the Patriots did not maximize the likelihood of success. Thus the stat-heads, in essence, should have altered the assumptions for their calculations, based on the on the field observations, from the last couple of minutes of the game. Maybe the Patriots should have punted.

There are some arguments against punting. Easterbrook focused on the specific offense/defense matchups as determined by this particular game. Easterbrook wrote that, on the previous possession, the Colts drove 79 yards in 1:40, without a time out, for a touch down. Easterbrook also noted that, to his eyes, the Patriots defense seemed a step behind the Colts offense. Also, the Patriots were playing against a weak secondary. As it happened, Brady and company rolled up 370 yards on the night. It seemed like they should have had a greater than the league average chance of converting the 4th down.  They might have had a slightly lower than league average chance of defending ~70 yards, had they punted, as they had just shown they could give up a long drive (although Simmons pointed out that the Patriots stopped the Colts in 5 of the last 7 defensive series in that game.)

Again, the two arguments are  whether the Patriots can stop the Manning with under 2 minutes and whether Brady plus Faulk, Welker, and Moss can gain 2 yards. On the field, there are probably enough game-related distractions and observations for Belichek. As Posnanski said, there might have been a lot going in Belichek’s mind. It might have taken him until the last second to come to some conclusion about what to do on that fourth down. He probably did know, in general terms, the arguments above, but might not have led to a clear cut answer. He might have just decided that there was a very good chance his QB would have found a way to get the 2 yards. Although I support Simmons’s argument (and only because I think the win probability is shaded just slightly more towards punting, with Simmons’s modifications taken into account), I’m not sure if punting is a clear answer with so much time left on the clock, against a quarterback like Manning.

I think both punt and no-punt, observational arguments are valid. And the whole point of statistics is to help you weigh these alternatives against some metric (i.e. the league average.) Where it actually detracts from the analysis (to the non-statistician’s mind mind) is when the likelihoods of a positive outcome, for the considered alternatives, are rather similar.

The two points here is that, 1) contrary to Simmons point that observations are somehow better, observations also led to two contradictory, sound conclusions about the overall strategy, and 2) with the situation as stated, punting was still not a guarantee of a win (punting would have been the better option as time left to play decreased.)

The problem with the former is that we have a tendency to shoehorn these anecdotes into fitting the conclusions that we want to draw. That’s why having some statistics can provide a context for evaluating the single sample observations. You can’t do what Simmons did, which is to say that the aggregate is wrong because of the details in this situation (wrong play selection or no strategy leading to a 4th down conversion attempt) just as you can’t argue against the punt if a punt return-touchdown happened. Because in the aggregate, these things are aberrations. Even if Simmons arguments for punting was strong, it probably should have modified the outcome to only a greater than 50% winning probability, not the 100% win that Simmons thinks. In other words, you can’t just turn a 60% win probability into 100% just because you chose it. In the aggregate, both plays would yield a win more than 50% of the time.

Some other criticisms of Simmons’s piece: not all stats are created equal. Examples of what not to do with stats include Simmons using spurious stats, like how often there are 3TDs scored in the 4th quarter, to bolster his point. But why limit it to 4th quarter? Why not just look at how often 3TDs are scored in a quarter? Or why look at only 2 point conversion plays, on the road? I know Simmons made a point about how this particular play is set up like one, but the proper comparison is still against all 2 yard attempts or a comparison against all 2-point conversion plays. The problem is that, he made no attempt to discuss the validity of that particular stat in general before analyzing the break downs. In some regards, it might be simpler to prove the general case before the specific one. And certainly it helps to present all the splits, not just the ones that support your case.

Part of the issue with probability and statistics is that people do not have the luxury of the long-run or multiple trials. We only have this one trial. Which brings us the the asymmetry referred to in the title of this post. Models are one way in that one can build them by collecting multiple observations; it is a mug’s game to apply models to predict a specific event. Something might happen, until it does; the model is probabilistic, but the outcome is binary. That is part of the difficulty in accepting statistical models.

I thought that Simmons piece indicated that he did not separate the overall strategy with the details of the execution.  As he is so fond of arguing, the details cannot be captured by a simple measure as “conversion”. There were many ways of getting there: is a recovered fumble an ideal way of converting a 4th down? How about a penalty against the defense? Was it a 4th and inches grind forward? Was it 8 yd pass against a weak opponent? Did the coach rest the first string defense in the fourth quarter, with the game well in hand? However, this was in the context of a Brady plus Welker, Faulk, and Moss offense that had nearly 400 yards on the night. That is a detail that Simmons did not dwell on. The players gave the Patriots a legitimate shot at converting the 4th down. It was the playcalling from Belichek that failed the Patriots. I thought it was unfair for Simmons to trash the strategy based on the example of this particular play.

And to spread the criticism a bit, I don’t think it makes sense to never punt, as Easterbrook maintains (though he argues this from an aesthetic perspective.)  The contribution of that particular play to the overall win probability depends on the situation. It is the coach’s job to identify the most significant factors in terms of the aggregate (i.e. whole NFL result) and then apply it to an analysis of how his particular offensive and defensive play callings maximize the actual performance of his players.

Simmons missed a great opportunity to show how a proper analysis should be done. He could have supported the obvious point, that, hey, to maximize on that 60% success rate, you need to treat this like a normal play in a scripted series, not like a 2 pt conversion. He even said as much; another one of his points is that Belichek did not treat the whole series like a four down set. Doing so would have enhanced the overall chance of success. Instead, he raised the metaphorical equivalent of the “blogger-in-Mom’s-basement” attack against stat-heads: that they don’t watch the games. And that watching the game would have told you what the correct strategy was. I don’t think that was the case as all, as the contrary view can be derived using Easterbrook’s asssumptions.

I got to thinking about a difference between writers and commenters. One crucial difference is skill, naturally. However, I am thinking about some of the emails sportswriters such as Joe Posnanski, Dave Berri, Peter King, and Bill Simmons get. The best correspondence they publish tends to follow up on a thought, often giving an example about some tragedy the pundits had written about.

Considering this small and selective sample, I concluded that the main difference beween lay writers and the professional is context. Professionals establish context in which lay writers tend to work. That is, professional writers organize examples by their themes, while the lay writers (i.e. commenters) write single examples. This leads, firstly, to the difference in length. The commenters provide an example or a vignette that refers to the established idea. I suppose one-graf bloggers tend to fall into this category, no matter how good the actual prose is. The professional writer would have developed the context for his main argument before using examples to emphasize his own point. While longer is not always better, of course developing ideas take up space. This leads to longer pieces. It takes a bit of skill to compress ideas into a paragraph (try reading abstracts from science papers and see if it makes sense to someone outside of the field you work in. The good ones will make sense to someone who doesn’t work in your field.)

For now, I want to focus on the difference between a professional writer’s and a scientist’s mode of writing. At the level of sports pundits and analysis, there are the Joe Posnanskis and Bill Simmons of the world, and there are popularizer of research, like Dave Berri. All three are wonderful writers for their fields, but I would rather read Posnanski and Simmons before Berri, if considering only the literary aspects of their writing. Nevertheless, the main difference between the two is not in the scope but in the details that provide context for their pieces.

Recently, Posnanski wrote about his desire to adopt a baseball stat for his blog. He hinted at reasons for disliking OPS (simply, on-base percentage + slugging avg), and presented an argument for his “hitting average.” That’s all fine and good; readers of Dave Berri’s blog and book Wages of Wins will note that finding Berri in fact tries to find statistical measures of athlete “productivity” that relates to point production and thus, wins. Now, here’s the difference between Posnanski’s and Berri’s approaches. It certainly isn’t scope, since both are ostensibly doing the same thing. However, Berri’s approach is scientifically sound where Posnanski’s isn’t, despite Posnanski dealing with objective mathemetical measures.

A caveat: I am not saying that Posnanski’s stat or approach is wrong. Posnanski has made every attempt to say that what he is doing is more for aesthetic reasons and than to find THE stat, the single model that explains MOST aspects of baseball. Again, I am merely considering their styles of presentation, which are partially limited by the scope and how they approach the details.

In any case, Posnanski details how stat-geek readers of his blog, led by Tom Tango, generated a new stat called “linear weights ratio.” Posnanski tests this stat out by checking the rankings of a number of players; of course, there is some alignment with more traditional advanced baseball stats. He also presents the formula for his hitting average, for readers to play with. Again, there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with this; Posnanski isn’t doing econometrics. If anything, he is doing a great service by getting various reads to think mathematically. But Posnanski doesn’t provide a context to evaluate that new metric. Mainly, he doesn’t compare this metric to established metrics. In contrast, Berri’s approach is, in essence scientific, since his arguments are constrained by the context of describing and comparing these metrics.

This context is the difference between a layman’s approach and a scientist’s approach. Berri did much the same thing as Posnanski suggests in researching basketball players’ productivity. Berri looked at the linear regression of things like points score, shooting percentage, rebounds, turnovers, and so forth, on the amount of points scored. Based on these stats and the weights identified from the regression analysis, he generated a linear model. He placed this stat, Wins Produced, into context by first applying it to all NBA players through all years for which stats are available, he compared its correlation to points scored for and against to existing NBA statistical models, and he generated points of comparisons for each NBA player to the “mean” player at his position. In this way, he is able to actually determine that his measure has a higher correlation to the efficiency differential (points scored – points given up) than the other stats. He was also able to identify the main difference between his and other models, in that the other models tend to use points scored as opposed to the ratio of points scored and shots attempted.

The weights Berri used are not arbitrary in the sense that he simply pulled them out in order to emphasize some difference between NBA players that he thought should exist. Naturally, he might have removed some measures from his model because the weight isn’t high enough, but that’s a different matter from “fine tuning” the weight. Regardless, the most important point is that generally, he made a model from the aggregates that significantly correlated with efficiency differential before applying the model to the players. In this way, he has created rankings of NBA player productivity that has generated some arguments in the sport pundit community (for an example, see here, here, here and here.)
While the particulars aren’t important, the conflict is illustrative of a scientific versus a more laid-back  (although it could still be rigorous) analytical approach. For Berri, he simply sets up a model, cranks out the numbers, and then organizes his views of the players by examining the stats. For the laid-back approach, one sees if the stat is properly associated with a player. Again, this latter approach is fine, within its domain. Sports writers are not scientists, nor do they control the purse strings for a sports team. Even within a sports franchise, one does not need to rely on statistics, if they so desire. As Berri notes, the stats comprise merely one component of NBA evaluation. It’s a shortcut to organizing player’s performance. In no case does it substitute ways of identifying why certain players are not rebounding, or generating enough assists, or reducing their turnovers.

In the Posnanski example, he presented a stat which is correlated with runs scored in baseball. He didn’t say whether this correlation is necessarily higher than other measures (such as OPS). This is a subtle point that is often missed. If the correlations between both measures are similar, than there really is no difference. Of course, there may be a lot more numbers involved in one over the other, but most scientists would simpler choose with one with fewer values. It’s probably also easier to calculate. Using the other numbers do not give you added value. I have seen people talk about complex stats as if complexity (lots of math squigglies) is somehow better or is more correct. That is not the case.

So, how does this relate to writing styles? Well, if the laymen write in examples, and professional writers extract themes and trends from examples, then scientists try to extract ideas/themes/trends that apply to all examples (well, ideally, all, but in generally they try to capture data from a meaningful sample that is indicative of the whole population.)

However, there is a limitation in the presentation of a scientific finding: the conclusions are bound by the premise of the hypothesis and the methods and measures that are used. Thus, in Berri’s case, he presents arguments for NBA player’s productivity in terms of his measure (or other measures, if he’s interested in comparing the different metrics.) But he is constrained by that, less so in his blog, but certainly in his peer-reviewed papers. As a matter of fact, Berri’s blog tends to be a bit dry, breaking down a player’s deficiencies by examining the particulars of how low his shooting percentage, rebounds, assists, etc are relative to the league or position average. Just as importantly, Berri suggests that the metric is best used as an entry point into proper player evaluation and development. It’s a short hand for identify players who might be improved. Despite Berri suggesting players don’t change much from year to year, from team to team, from coach to coach, it may be because no one has tailored a practice program for players based on this simple evaluation. Or it may reflect the ceiling offered by a player’s talent. Aside from these straightfoward analysis of why players have below, above, or near average productivity, Berri doesn’t write about how he might enjoy watching certain NBA players. I think it gives an unfair impression that he is a bloodless machine who doesn’t know what a basketball looks like. His model does not account for flair, style, or aesthetics that is probably the raison d’etre for watching sports in the first place.

For sports writers like Simmons and Posnanski, they approach it from the aesthetic domain first. The assumption is that they have an eye for talent and style, and that this is applicable to how everyone else enjoys watching that player or game. I don’t mean that they are interested in a so-called objective way to rank the entertainment or productive value of these players. I mean that they want, but are frustrated by the fact that they can’t always, to identify an essence of a player that can be applied without qualification or exception and can be easily demonstrable. The clearest example is in the way some describe and compare Kobe Bryant to Michael Jordan. Dave Berri can rank the two, not only in absolute terms but as some standard deviation above the league average for their eras. In that comparison, not only is Jordan more “productive” than Kobe, he is a nearly twice so. Simmons would argue that Kobe is the best there is now. He might be a cut below Jordan, but there is no player closer.

One solution here is to recognize that there is a difference between the professional and the scientific presentation of ideas. Berri started from the metrics first, despite whatever he might think about the players. Simmons cannot, or would not, separate the aesthetics and productivity of the players he enjoys watching. There is nothing wrong with either approach. The only difference is that Berri’s work easily translates into a scientific publication format. Its details all concern finding some measure, defending that measure, identifying advantages of using that measure, and discussing how this measure may be insufficient. In other words, Berri and other scientists are biased into finding “measurables”. For better or for worse, because in the end, the basic scientific hypothesis is “how much.” How much did this drug improve patient outcome? How much did the tumor reduce? How much is a photon deflected from its true path by a massive body? Can we identify how many molecules of this do we have?

This isn’t necessarily a reductionist approach; at its best, finding quantifables is a way of creating a reference point so we can start to discuss things. Thus, the proper angle to take against a scientist (i.e. Berri) is to identify and improve on his assumptions, find a different metric that gives a higher correlation, or improve on his metric by finding more terms that add value to enhance correlation. In other words, scientific discussion is limited by the context of the methods, which acts as a framework for subsequent arguments.

The sports writers do not have this limitation. They can seque between stats and aesthetics. Like Simmons, they can also sprinkle pop-culture references that actually advance their argument. However, I think because they do approach things from an aesthetic angle first, they tend to provide contexts based on motifs and not on metrics. In other words, it allows Simmons to focus on the literary spin of his piece, relating the NBA offseason to lines from  the movie Almost Famous. It allows Posnanski to say that he wants a new stat, because he doesn’t like how OPS is pronounce “ops” and not “Oh-Pee-Ess”. There is a lot of room for literary flourish, which shouldn’t make the argument any more objective, but it becomes much more enjoyable.

Interestingly enough, and, ironically, I haven’t looked at this for all cases, I think for the most part, Simmons and Berri emphasizes the same attributes they want from their ideal basketball player. They want someone who can shoot well (i.e. high shooting percentage), score a lot of points, make passes for assists, don’t cough the ball up, and make rebounds. Where they differ is in how they rank the so called “top players”.  Berri has noted that most conventional players evaluation centers on points scored (without regard to the number of misses the player made.) He has noted that player rankings and player salaries have a correlation of 0.99 compared to points scored. And strangely enough, Berri’s work showed that scoring points, by itself, does not lead to higher efficiency differentials. Despite what writers and general managers profess about finding complete basketball players, they put their money on the point-getters. In other words, all the verbiage devoted to arguing how smooth and graceful players are, how much one should enjoy their talent before they fade into old age, the idea of “aesthetics” and “points” are no different. It’s interesting that Berri noted that in fact there may be an implicit metric being used to evaluate players based on the so called explicit measure of a player’s style/gracefulness/aethetics.

http://dberri.wordpress.com/2007/05/15/speeding-up-time-for-bill-simmons/

Detective Newton

Margret Guthrie of The Scientist gave a favorable review to Newton and the Counterfeiter. It sounds like a wonderful little vignette into the great mathe-magician’s life.

The philosopher eventually assembled such a compelling case against Chaloner — from testimony by witnesses, informants, and even the wives and mistresses of the criminal’s associates — that he was able to bring him up on charges of counterfeiting the King’s coin, a treasonable offence, in 1698.

On Thomas Levenson’s writing, she notes

[His] pace and timing rival those of the best crime story authors. He has written a real page-turner, perfect for a long afternoon’s engagement with the hammock or whiling away a long airport layover.

Nature journal has published a review of Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics. The book is a re-release, and Alan Lightman recommends the book. It is a set of short stories with cosmological themes. It is whimsical, in one case having a mollusc imagining it had a mustache. The anthology compared favorably with Primo Levy’s Periodic Table. I am now interested in reading Cosmicomics. I have yet to read Levy’s book, although it is collecting dust on my book shelf.

Thoughts on Ken MacLeod’s Engine City

I want to avoid trashing books, since the goal of this blog is to engage the ideas, themes, and characters of books, on the author’s terms. However, Engine City has such issues with writing and presentation that it seems unavoidable that I talk about the writing. I didn’t like the characters in this book. I did not care what happened to them. The leaps from chapter to chapter isn’t graceful but comes across as disjointed. It isn’t always straightforward how one chapter necessarily relates to the last, despite the fact that the story progresses linearly, switching among various time points and character perspectives. Another source of confusion lies in the advancement of story by years – and it isn’t always clear by how many years – as the story uses slow-than-light travel, meaning that there is time-dilation. To be sure, the story, plot, and characters aren’t difficult to follow, but the writing disrupted narrative flow and went a long way to sour the novel’s entertainment value for me.

Aside from that, I thought there are a number of interesting ideas. First and foremost, MacLeod tackles the issue of the Singularity. For all intents and purposes, the Singularity implies the existence of an advanced intelligence. We cannot hope to relate, in our present humanity, to this intelligence. It matters not where the intelligence arose (alien, human made silica, or post-transcendence human.) Various sci-fi authors have settled into different camps/schools, regarding how they should tackle this subject. Some of them argue that it is difficult to write about post-Singularity events, so it makes sense to ignore it and focus on the non-transcendent characters. In other words, the authors will continue to muck it out with the plebes. Some others focus on mundanes interacting/divining the intentions of the Singularity.

I, for one, do not see the difficulty in dealing with the Singularity. Since humans cannot hope to understand a god’s mind, or a Singularity-intelligence, I think, practically speaking, we can make up any motive/action that we want. After all, such an approach has worked for religion. Therefore, I do not see putting words into god’s mouth as a hurdle for sci-fi writers.

MacLeod introduces such a concept, although this aspect of the story isn’t really emphasized. The gods, in this case, arose from nanp-silica based life on asteroids. Bathed in the energy of the sun, they aggregated not into a multi-cell organism, but a networked multi-cellular, super-intelligence. And this super-intelligence does not like noise. So it does what any self-respecting Transcendent will do, who has access to computational powers to model million-body Newtonian mechanical problems. It uses mass-driver weapons to destroy, with pinpoint precision, sources of said noise. The only thing it needs are the right sized asteroids and time. We find out how this intelligence deals with infestations at the beginning and the end of the novel.

What happens in between deals with humans, displaced into a set of star systems on the other side of Sol, readying themselves for an alien invasion. The alien invasion, it turns out, may be a red herring. It turns out these aliens are in fact our creators, and we are not certain what threat they carry.  They already had one colony that had been destroyed on earth (and they had manipulated lifeforms there that eventually evolved into humans.) The novel concerns itself with the interface between humans and their creators, although this matter isn’t probed too deeply.

The nature of these creatures is that they can make a lot of things. They are, in essence, cornucopias. This is a direction that comes too late in the way the novel is plotted; as it is, we don’t really see what impact these creatures would have. A new philosophical idea was also introduced: if the gods could develop out in hard vacuum, in nanostructures of space material, then such intelligences may also have developed on a planet. This “gaia” may work in concert with the gods in the asteroids. Again, this idea came too late, since, at this point, new characters enter the plot and eventually captures and executes the heroes.It is interesting that the heroes were executed not for their role in fomenting instability and war, but for “deicide”. Thus, it is as if the story was composed of multiple short stories.

At first, I thought this proved a failing, since it led to abrupt transitions, dangling plot lines, and unexplored consequences. Over time, I can see how this style of exposition may have worked. The exposition style limits our point of view to when our heroes make their port of calls, after a physical journey of immense temporal delays. We see them encounter civilization at different points of development. Their unsteady grasp of their present encounter is mirrored by the reader’s own disorientation after each time jump, with disorientation lessening as the plot develops for that time period. Unfortunately, I do not feel that MacLeod pulled it off.

Review – Tom Perotta – Little Children and The Abstinence Teacher, Part II

OK. I should have moved on. I have continued reading, but haven’t posted any reviews. However, this book really stuck with me, and I need to get this off my chest.

I have noted in my review of Little Children that Perotta paints sympathetic portraits of suburbanites. Sure, by merely describing how they act, Perotta hoists the lot of them on their own petards. Again, I need to stress that Perotta does not present a one-sided portrait of these harried fathers and mothers. This is important, as Ruth and Tim, the two protagonists, are on two opposite sides of the debate on sex education and how far private religion should extend into public schooling.

Of the two, Ruth comes across as insouciant and flip. It actually makes it hard to root for her, despite the fact that hers is probably the more realistic point of view: kids will have experiment and have sex. Why ignore this fact and tell them to repress their urges? Sex education becomes damage control, rather than a vaccination. Her nemesis is JoAnn, not surprisingly, an attractive, sexy, but virginal spokeswoman for a conservative Christian organization. Again, Perotta avoids the easy send-up; as portrayed, there are no dissatisfied boyfriends, grumbling fiance, or kinky neuroses (or any hint of “doesn’t-really-count-as-sex” sex). As a matter of fact, JoAnn comes across as rather dignified, given the contrast in Ruth’s divorced, lonely, and somewhat aimless life. However, there is no doubt that Perotta’s sympathy lies with Ruth; the arguments against knowledge of sex usually are spoofed with wild figures, false accounts of disease transmittance or injunctions from the Bible. Ruth at least gives voice to various numbers and facts about STDs and birth control.

Tim enters the story as Ruth’s daughter’s soccer coach. After a win, Tim gathers his players, who form a circle to give thanks to God. Ruth is mortified, and so the plot is set; Tim and Ruth fall into their roles as adversaries, although Tim is generally an unwilling participant. Tim comes off as a sincere man, who wandered in his youth and failed as a husband and father. Now divorced, he shares custody of his daughter and tries hard to make amends. He too is somewhat aimless; he desires the past that he has lost and has no idea how to let go or move on. He is prodded into a relationship, and then marriage, with Carrie, a fellow parishioner, by the pastor.

It would be easy to focus on the red state/blue state split, the evangelical authoritarians against the liberal sophisticates. There are no new arguments here. What I carried from this book was an admiration of how well Perotta portrays characters. Even the pastor, the obvious lightning rod for anti-evangelical sentiment, doesn’t fall into that role. Pastor Dennis is a dynamic young man who converted Tim. I think enthusiastic best describes Dennis. Dennis is naturally disgusted with Tim for being so weak now; of course Tim made mistakes with his first wife. But now Tim pursues Ruth, spurning Carrie, and it seems realistic to me that while Dennis may overlook past transgression, he abhors what Tim does.

I think the least sympathetic character in the whole book is Carrie, Tim’s wife. She is dutiful to a fault. When I write these reviews, I have no  idea what the author’s intentions are (unless I’ve read interviews). It seems to me that Perotta’s intention with Carrie is to use her to represent the worse of the Christian authoritarian movement. First, Tim does admit that Carrie is his better. But then Perotta twists the knife a little – against Carrie. Carrie realizes it. Her attempt to provide a stable home is her duty. Her settling down with Tim is her duty. When Carrie buys sexy lingerie to ignite passion in their lives, it’s her duty. Submerging her desires; it’s her duty. Her marriage to Tim is a duty.

Therein lies Perotta’s main point; why are evangelicals so gung-ho about submission? Worse, it isn’t even as if Carrie does her duty for god. It is unclear if her motivation is faith, fear of being alone, or a need to amend her past by starting a life as a chaste wife. It is unclear what emptiness she is trying to fill. I might have mis-read the book, but I thought that all the other characters seem sincere. They generally believed in what they are doing, even if how they go about it turns into a complete mess. We don’t read too much about JoAnn’s life, or Pastor Dennis’s wife. As I had mentioned, it seems that JoAnn has it together.

As for Pastor Dennis, there is an element of pride in his pushing Tim to do the right thing; Tim was an official convert. Again, that is a reasonable portrayal of a very human sin. Tim struggles; he has lusts, and he knows what comes of it. He lost his wife over it. But lust is on the same continuum as a capacity for passion; he lacks that with his current wife. One problem is the biblical injunction to have stability, to have a woman simply to temper the man’s wild urges. Ruth is no stranger to sex; she has even enjoyed some of it. But she has also felt pain at being used, and her adult life seems devoted to addressing the symptoms of promiscuity, the logistics of avoiding pregnancy and disease management, and not so much really helping kids – or herself – find happiness or joy on their own terms. Ruth understands enough that religion is not a salve, and neither is living for the moment. But she isn’t sure how to proceed with living in the moment, to be happy and not merely pleasure-seeking. Carrie, by contrast, seems bitter. She has grown to dislike her past (promiscuous) self, but she doesn’t like her present self either. However, she seized on the fact that being able to suppressing her desires places her on moral ground, and more importantly higher than her husband. Despite her meekness, that’s the game she decides to play, and she certainly knows the score. That makes her the ugliest character in the story.

The strength of this story lies in the complicated characters. Especially Ruth and Tim, who are both aimless but sense they are currently at the nadir of their lives. In the end, Tim of course puts his lot with Ruth; although it should be a big statement against the use of religion, sex, or marriage as a bandaid on dissatisfaction with life, it felt more like a realistic first step these two trying to decide what actually makes them happy. I think this is a sublime ending.

Review: Tom Perrotta, Little Children and The Abstinence Teacher, Part I

Note: Not cool. I have had part of my review for Little Children and The Abstinence Teacher in draft for a couple of weeks. My blog is titled “No Time to Read”, I have less time writing reviews. I wanted to avoid writing short posts, as I prefer reading and writing longer, more thoughtful pieces. One thing I want to do is to combine and find links among multiple works (and I try doing that, somewhat clumsily, in this review.) To hell with that, I suppose. I’ll post the review as written, and I will follow up with the review of TAT “shortly”. I’ve also linked the books to Porter Square Bookstore, rather than Amazon, as Amazon doesn’t need my help.

Little Children and The Abstinence Teacher are two complex, sympathetic works. These are the only two Perrotta books I have read, but it is clear to me that he is a generous author, who is able to detail the complex thought chains lying below each of his characters’ surfaces. This generosity turns symbols into living, breathing people, enabling them to transcend simple, thematic opposition and actually interact with one another. The key point is that he does not treat the opposition as punching bags.

Little Children is the lesser work of the two, if only because the plot seems stilted next to the personalities. The inclusion of a child-molester in this story seems to serve no purpose other than to enable some opportunities for Brad to get out of the house (as part of a neighborhood watch group) and to provide some dramatic tension near the end of novel.

There is one misstep in characterization that occurs on the first page, when the women are introduced – except for our protagonist Sarah – as the mother of so-and-so child. It isn’t symbolism: it is a neon  sign that states Sarah is the contrarian of the bunch, a lapsed feminist who longs to be defined by anything other than motherhood. For the most part, the other women, who serve more as the Harpies than a Greek chorus, are not fleshed out. There is one little vignette where the shrew’s (Mary Ann’s) unhappy home life is laid bare, but for the rest of the story they serve to remind Sarah of the destiny awaiting her. No conversation is more meaningful than where the offspring is going to preschool, what toys are being recalled, what TV shows one had watched through heavy-lidded eyes.

That alone would drive one to drink, but Sarah chooses adultery instead. She was and is a mousy girl, who wanted to but couldn’t date the popular jock in high-school or college; she achieves this juvenile ambition by eventually sleep with Brad, a househusband who should be studying for his third attempt at passing the bar exam. The affair has great power within the context of the trapped lives both Sarah and Brad feel they lead. The excitement isn’t so much in the illicit nature of sneaking behind their spouses but rather in the fact that they share a common appreciation of one another. Therein lies the trick in Perrotta humanizing the two; certainly, I felt badly for Richard and Kathy, the spurned spouses. But I felt more sadness than anger in Sarah and Brad finding their escape in each other.

The humanization comes because one can identify with the cause of the affair: the perception that one’s spouse doesn’t fully appreciate him as a partner. It is not a matter of reality; it is that one spouse feels put upon and felt the need to seek that appreciation elsewhere. Brad is the simple case: he is going through his mid-life crisis early. He has failed the bar exam twice, but he states he entered law school on a whim. He watches teenage boys skateboarding and longs to join; instead, he winds up with a bunch of cops and ex-cops in a football league. He is satisfied being a house husband, but of course his wife is expecting him to contribute financially. Her moral support of his attempting the bar exam has crossed from wishing him well into an expectation that he will fail and not pull his financial weight. Sarah’s case is just as simple: her husband isn’t interested in her. She wants to be significant. She is intelligent, but decides that the only way to distinguish herself from the pack of mothers is to flirt with Brad. The two hit it off.

It would have been  cheap for Perrotta to distance the reader from Richard and Kathy. Instead, Perrotta turns them into people, each with flaws. Kathy is a harried woman, one reaching the limit of her patience with her husband. Fairly or not, she feels too put upon. She works and so doesn’t spend enough time with her son. Although she is following her dream of directing documentaries, it doesn’t pay well. She has been understanding and a cheerleader for her husband – despite his repeated failure. She is tired. Richard is more difficult to describe; he appreciated Sarah’s intelligence when they first met and now provides financial stability for their family. But in the end, he too is tired and desires something less ordinary.

That is what I like about Perrotta’s writing. Sure, he slings barbs at suburban life, but his characters are people like you or me. Under any number of circumstances, we could be Sarah, Richard, Kathy or Brad. Perrotta’s characters in an understandable manner, despite our disapproval. Recently, I had read Pinker’s The Blank Slate, which helped crystallized some ideas about human emotional and cultural baggage for me. Perrotta’s characters strike me as real because he describes the dissonance between basic desires driving action (i.e. nature) and  professed desires (the sum of education, environment, and upbringing) so well.

One scene that illustrates this is when Brad notices that his son flat out ignores him as soon as Mom (Kathy) comes home. That scene bundles the flash of Brad’s jealousy of the bond between son and mother, the fact that the boy and mother essentially enter their own world and exclude him, and the fact that he might be feeling both unmanly (for being a house husband) and his efforts not being recognized by his son or appreciated by his wife. Everything about this scene rings of authenticity. Again, without declaring whether there is validity in the perception (although one will be either sympathetic to Brad or not), the sum of all these minor events build up the case that Perrotta is interested in explaining (and thus looking past one’s view of the adulterers), but not excusing , Brad’s and Sarah’s behaviors.

I would guess the moral of the story is that communication only goes so far. Perhaps that is what love means: that a partner thinks enough of the other person to continue talking. If so, then Perrotta must think the world a loveless place.

How I read

I am a big fan of e-books. I got my first personal digital assistant (PDA), a Visor Pro, with the express purpose of reading on it. I have since used countless PDAs and e-book reading programs. Currently, I find most of my reading time on my commute to work (by subway) and in “micro-moments.” With a PDA in hand, I can start reading at a moment’s notice, and I usually do, even with only a few minutes available to me at a time. The minutes add up. Currently, I use my iPod Touch for reading books. I must be one be a singleton, holding an iPod on the train, sans head phones, staring intensely at the screen.

I also find ludicrous that anyone would argue that there are clear advantages to paper or e-books; I absolutely love to read, and I cannot care less how I do it. I can point to several instances, in the past few months, where I made a conscious decision to avoid one or the other, for whatever reason. I prepare for air travel by borrowing a few books from the library. I have been purchasing more and more history and science works in e-book form. I occasionally by reference works, on paper, that can benefit from a persistent footprint (e.g. cookbooks, protocols, technical works, etc.) In other words, to hew so closely to one form of text over the other, to the point of making a philosophical to-do about it, is a senseless expenditure of energy. I am a big fan of the pragmatic; I read in the form that is most convenient for me at the time.

With that said, there is something about the smell and physicality of a book that appeals to me. No, I do not read or buy books for showing off; my bookshelves are in my wife’s and my bedroom. I love walking into a bookstore or library; I am comforted. It is my church. The downside of books is the physical aspect of it. There is a reason the bookshelves are hidden in the bedroom: we do not have another spot for them. Clearly, one difference that I found useful in e-books is that they don’t take up physical space. I have 500 e-books on my palm, and I love having my library with me.

At this point, I am thinking that you can guess that the title of the blog isn’t an excuse for why I am not reading, but rather a complaint about how little time I do spend reading. I suppose I cannot be doing so badly: I have a count for most of the books I have read in the past 5 or so years: 318. That includes the e-books and p-books I bought; it doesn’t include the library books I have borrowed and read. I guess it works out to about 5 books a month; it isn’t impressive, given the rate some other readers devour books, but since I have a day job that takes up way too much time (but it’s engaging work!), a wife, and a 3.5 year old, I get some slack, don’t I?

I have already posted a handful of reviews elsewhere on the web; sooner or later, I’ll reprint them here. I will add links to book stores as well as Fictionwise; that’s my vendor of choice for e-books, and they have recently gone from being a retailer to publishing partner. Fictionwise bought eReader, an e-book format and a reading software developer. There are “readers” available for PDAs, computers, and now the iPhone.

Try Umpteen

This is my sixth blog. The others dealt with topics that are well-mined by everyone who blogs: a photojournal of my son (target audience: grandparents), contributions to other people’s, more well-known blogs (mostly of the tech variety), and personal observations (target audience: me).

I have flailed, trying to find a topic that engages me. Although I can write a fair amount my work (and I do believe there is something interesting to mine there), I spend my late nights working on book reviews. It seemed clear that if I wanted to feed, care, and grow a blog, writing about books should do the trick.

Well, they aren’t so much reviews as they are notes on what I have gained in reading the book. I think treating reviews as recommendations, or some referendum on the quality of the work, presumes that one can influence others. I take the view that if books are supposedly so dear to me, I should treat them with a little bit more respect. Thus, I will resist encapsulating reviews in some form of a ratings system. I hope that these reviews help pair books with readers, for whom the themes, characters, and ideas will resonate.

In addition to reviews, I will probably post notes and thoughts, as I am reading a book. I think the most interesting books should spur more than a single summation; I am already spending too much time thinking about what I read anyway. I hope readers find the posts interesting.