Do the Math: A Novel of the Inevitable

by Philip B. Persinger

What could be worse than losing the love of your life? Getting her back!William Teale is a brilliant professor of mathematics. His theory of inevitability posits that any human action, no matter how insignificant, might result in a disproportionately huge calamity.His wife, Virginia "Faye" Warner, is a world-famous romance novelist who specializes in reuniting soul mates after a tragic and prolonged separation. According to her math, "one past and two hearts plus one love equals four-ever." The Teale-Warner marriage is a thing of geometric and artistic perfection, a melding of the heart and the brain-amour and algebra.But when Faye's ghostwriter suffers a nervous breakdown and shakes all the arrows out of Cupid's quiver, Faye reintroduces her husband to love. Unfortunately, it's not with herself, but with the woman William had loved and lost years ago. Love is about to clash with inevitability, and it's unclear which will emerge victorious.Told in the off-beat voice of William's graduate intern, Roger, Do the Math reveals the curious relationship between logic and love and the delightful consequences of taking a chance.

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2008

Reviews

[Moriah · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read a review of this book that pissed me off, but the blurb looked interesting and so I went forth to iUniverse (yes, it's independently published) to purchase the ebook. I will spare you the nightmare of actually getting the book, but iUniverse? Bite me. Fortunately, the author came through for me when I copied him on my bitchmail to iUniverse (which they still haven't responded to). Anyway, he got me a print copy of his book posthaste and so I was a fan on that basis alone.

Here's the blurb:

What could be worse than losing the love of your life? Getting her back!

William Teale is a brilliant professor of mathematics. His theory of inevitability posits that any human action, no matter how insignificant, might result in a disproportionately huge calamity.

His wife, Virginia "Faye" Warner, is a world-famous romance novelist who specializes in reuniting soul mates after a tragic and prolonged separation. According to her math, "one past and two hearts plus one love equals four-ever." The Teale-Warner marriage is a thing of geometric and artistic perfection, a melding of the heart and the brain-amour and algebra.

But when Faye's ghostwriter suffers a nervous breakdown and shakes all the arrows out of Cupid's quiver, Faye reintroduces her husband to love. Unfortunately, it's not with herself, but with the woman William had loved and lost years ago. Love is about to clash with inevitability, and it's unclear which will emerge victorious.

Told in the off-beat voice of William's graduate intern, Roger, Do the Math reveals the curious relationship between logic and love and the delightful consequences of taking a chance.

Only one bad point and it's technical: The funky paragraph breaks in dialog. Oh, I don't mean the looooong monologues that have to be broken, but, for example:

"Her home away from home," he answered. "Room 407. New Coventry Medical Center. Only the best."

"By the way," he added as he picked up Claire's drink and toasted me with it. "You did very well tonight, Roger."

That unnecessary split happened enough that it was annoying, but certainly not enough to diminish the overall fantasticity of this novel. If you ever needed a posterbook for the validity of self-publishing, this is it.

And one aside, which I don't know if it was tongue-in-cheek or not. A vague reference is made to the movie Poltergeist, but the story is set in 1978 and that movie didn't come out until 1982. I could see how that could go either way, so I'm giving the author the benefit of the doubt.

This is the story of 50-year-old professor of mathematics William Teale and Virginia, his romance-novel-writer wife and Claire, Teale's lost love from 25 years ago. It's told from the point of view of his 25-year-old intern, Roger, in first person. And oh, it takes place in 1978. Did I say that already?

This book's kinda sorta billed as a romance. I think. I'm not really sure. And I don't really know what it is anyway except hilarious. I know it's supposed to be poignant and bittersweet. I know it's supposed to be about Teale's relationship with his wife and his lost love. Really, I do know that.

But what you have to know going in is that I have an eccentric sense of humor and a wee bit of a crush on higher math. Can't add or subtract without a calculator (multiplication and long division are simply out of the question) and I really just don't care for discrete math much, but after some struggle and time, I'm a fair hand at simpler calculus. It's like the bad boy you just want to take home and try to tame.

Okay, so what that's got to do with the price of tea in China is this: If you don't get the math jokes, it's okay. It's still funny. If you do, it's ROFLMAO funny. The author conflates mathematics and romance in such a bizarre way I can't help but chortle just thinking about it. For instance, Teale tries to figure out what to do about his problem using set theory in a discussion with Roger:

"It's about balancing the quality of the empty set against one with two elements," I started out. "That just doesn't make sense."

"No, it doesn't," he said.

Relieved by that concession, I followed up.

"Then how can a set of two elements be qualitatively equivalent to an empty set?"

He smiled wearily. "Unexplored territory, isn't it?"

He thought a moment longer. "It's the wasteland," he said. "We understand the null set. There's nothing there. But a set of two elements which has no connection, or, if connected, no contiguousness, that is, ultimately a set that is in and of itself empty, isn't it?"

In other words, using set theory, Teale equates his relationship with his wife (two elements in one set that are disconnected) to a set with nothing in it.

All the little oddball characters that populate a college campus/faculty/town are fondly drawn and you can immediately find the equivalents of these people in the memories of your own college experience. All the subplots come together nicely in one tight, tidy little knot at the end (although I’ll admit I knew where one of them was going on page 23, and sure enough).

Now, about that “romance novels are just a formula” business: That is repeated ad nauseam throughout the tale, but funny enough, even though they spend valuable computer time (vacuum tubes! keypunch cards!) trying to figure it out, they read from a how-to-write-romance manual and follow it strictly, and yet they never manage to figure it out, disproving their own premise that there’s a real formula to it.

I had no problem with this facet for three reasons: (1) Though all the characters (including the romance novel writer and her ghostwriter) think this, it doesn’t seem to be thought of as a bad thing; it’s simply a fact of their life and needs to be adhered to as any other product specification, as they’re up against a deadline, and (2) This is set in 1978, remember. The specifications outlined are, to the best of my recollection, exactly how romances were written in the late ’70s, so I can’t really go throwing stones at fact (or at least my perception of fact), and (3) For all the “formula” talk, it was still respectful of the genre and its fans.

Some passages that made me howl (and wake up the Tax Deductions) got their pages dog-eared. (The horrors!) Examples (although I must warn you that my sense of humor is a bit, ah, weird, and these are somewhat out of context so they might not translate):

[Sample from a technical writer for a nuclear reactor handbook applying for the job of a romance novelist ghostwriter:]:

“ … pump type can be determined by identifying flange at top of housing. Inductive cooling pump has a rigid pressure release vent hanging down perpendicularly on flange centerline. Whereas action release coil pump is unique because of the two nipples protruding from either side directly above the emergency bleed valve.”

and

“A warning. The manifold might be hot. Use caution when sliding the spanner between the opened blades, as there is a danger of electrical arcing. It might be necessary to remove the probe from the main sheath and reinsert with proper lubrication. If vibration continues, apply appropriate torque to the uppermost junction point until release is achieved … ”

[Romance novelist:] closed the booklet with a rude snap.

"There has been a terrible misunderstanding here."

"I'm sorry?" said Claire.

"This seems so...how should I put it? Technical."



Even though it is in no real way similar, it vaguely reminded me of Neal Stephenson’s The Big U. Loved the premise, loved the voice, loved the characters and the humor is dry enough to make you beg for water.

And, oh, the author didn’t assume the reader would be 5 and need everything explained.

[Cheryl Anne Gardner · Rating 4 out of 5]

It’s 1978 and enter Roger ... college student, aspiring mathematician, and like most kids his age, he is lost. Yes, Roger would agree that he went very wrong in probability and statistics, so wrong that the active living of his life consists of eavesdropping on a world he has no real stake in. Our narrator is more or less a voyeur. Like most romance readers, they sit back and watch the tragic-comedy that is love unfold before their very eyes, only in this instance, like in The Great Gatsby, our voyeur actually narrates the story and becomes an unwitting participant in the events as they unfold. To begin, at the suggestion of his college advisor, Roger attempts to procure and intern position with a Mr. William Teale, said advisor’s old college roommate and a professor of mathematics at Hudson Polytechnic who is known to be rather eccentric, having not yet come to grips with his tragic failure in front of the Comstock review board earlier in his career. Teale, after the failure of his paper, had lost all will to dream and live big, settling instead for teaching the same curriculum for twenty years. But all that comes to an enlightening end when Roger rather deftly uses Teal’s theory of “Significant Inconsequentiality” to exact a meeting with the Professor at the Philadelphia airport. The meeting doesn’t end quite as Roger would have wanted. Actually, Roger wasn’t even aware that the meeting had ended until he had been sitting on a bench for a while. But happenstance happens, whether you are aware of it or not. Times passes briefly with Roger making an attempt at thoughts for the future when out of the blue he receives a mysterious letter extending an offer for the intern position with the subsequently written-off Professor Teal. So off Roger goes to New Coventry, where he is tasked with being a spy for a romance novel fan club, a frazzled professor’s intern, and a nurse-maid to Teal’s wife: the most famous American Romance Novelist Virginia “Faye” Warner, who reminded me of Joan Wilder with a severe case of agoraphobia, a rather abrasive self-centred personality disorder , and a dash of egomania thrown in for good measure. Yes, she isn’t the most polite and easy-going person, nor is she even remotely likable. We find out how unlikable she is when her ghost writer, Ambrose, after years of dealing with her, suffers a breakdown and can no longer write romance. Well, he refuses to write romance in general, but specifically for her. Teal attempts to assist his wife in her moment of crisis, but makes a terrible hiring decision and suffers the degradation and the emotional devastation that comes along with it.

This is what I would call a True Romance: sharp, witty, and filled with an irony only True Love can claim as its own. I can’t reveal too much about the plot-line for fear of ruining the story, but we have some essential elements: the brilliant academic who has lost his self-esteem and his faith; the shrew of a wife who overcompensates for her handicaps by bashing the shit out of everyone around her; the innocent narrator caught in the middle who tries desperately NOT to put two and two together; and the fan club members -- headed by a Mrs. Slocum, fan-fic writer extraordinaire -- who are doing the wrong things for the right reason, even if they have no idea that their platform is a farce. The fact that the Fan club is petitioning for their favourite woman romance writer to be included in the literary curriculum at New York College, Poughkeepsie is hilarious considering that the author hasn’t written her own books since the first one and that her ghost writer is a man. Even she declares rather adamantly that the genre isn’t about Love, it’s about romance and there is a script. With that notion firmly planted in his head, Teal is convinced he can discover the mathematical formula, so he sets off to log in time at the campus’s computer while his wife opts for cutting and pasting from her backlist. Now this is 1978, so the computer takes up a huge basement room, and cutting and pasting takes scissors and tape. But they plod on, and Teal eventually proves his own premise, which he calls The Deferred Premise Principle [...:] “You must have a premise by the end of the whole mess or it makes no sense at all.” Of course he doesn’t know he has literally proved it yet when he makes that statement.

Now I didn’t “get” a lot of the math humour, but it really didn’t matter or take away from the enjoyment of the story. I was told by the author that the “math” was 95% made up, so after hearing that, I didn’t feel as if I was left out of an inside joke. As for the characters, aside from Warner, they are all just lovable victims of happenstance to some degree or another, so they all compliment and repel each other at the same time. Life is known for its irksome set of variables, and so the characters just roll with it, clumsily so, but they do. Real life -- true love -- is not ruled by convention, even if we would like it to be sometimes. That said, the story did not run roughshod over the romance genre. Sure it plays with the conventions of 1978 romance writing a bit, but it isn’t extravagant in its absurdist view. Its premise is subtle, and the approach gently hints at the outcome throughout the story without coming off as predictable or overly exposed. There was no chop, not in the storyline, in the character development, or in the actual writing. The approach was minimalist, the humour was academically dry, and in some cases, our narrator is just witnessing a scene from afar, and so disconnected from the conversation, we have to make all the assumptions on our own. I really thought the technical use of distance was well-played and intriguing, as was the remarkably clean edit.

I suppose what I loved most about the book, besides its satirical look at the romance genre, was the mathematical juxtaposition we were presented with: The Predictability of Romance versus the Unpredictability and the Inevitability or rather The Significant Inconsequentiality of Love. That, to me, was the essence of the story. Happily ever after doesn’t necessarily come easy, and it certainly doesn’t come as expected. This story had real heart and soul, and while the ending may not have been Happily Ever After in the traditional fairytale sense of the phrase, it mirrored real life to perfection by showing that even if you get slightly derailed in life, there is always an opportunity to fix the mistakes and find happiness, even if the opportunity might seem inconsequential at first glance.

9/10

This book was purchased by the reviewer in Epub format from the Sony Reader Store.

[Misty Baker · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well, after a long day of percolating on “Do The Math” (i.e. Lines are really long in amusement parks) I finally came up with my answer.

Dang… this was a pretty decent book!

The title is, of course, more than enough to make most of the human population run in fear (myself included) but regardless of my math paranoia, the overall plot was a delightful mix of Nerd USA and Daniel Steele on a coffee binge.

Roger is a math geek. ( I wish there was a more elegant way to characterize him, but there isn’t) unsure of his future he hunts down his mathematical hero and begs to be his intern. After being left for a fool in a crowded airport Roger finally lands the gig, but what did he sign up for exactly? What seemed to be a dream turned into more of an adventure involving a used up mathlete, a romance novelist (appropriately washed up after 1 novel) a ghost writer with an alluring past and convenient connections, and a band of little old ladies hell bent on sending a message.

“Philip Persinger” raised the question: “What could be worse than losing the love of your life? Getting her back!” What he should have asked was, “Is it better to flood the audience with loads of mathematical mumbo jumbo in the beginning of the book or hit them with it later…after you’ve sucked them in?”

I will admit that I was not impressed by the first 10 or so chapters (relax.. there are 50) I thought they drug horribly and I put very serious consideration into burying the book under my mattress if heard one of non-sensical math term. Thankfully…after I hit the top of that hill the story evened out and became… wait for it… VERY INTERESTING!

I thought the writing was a little choppy during some of the dialogue, there were spaces in the “everyday” conversations that I felt were unnecessary, but overall the writing was very well executed. I can’t image that it was easy to combine 2 such different topics into a well thought out storyline, but alas…it was done, and it was done well.

Here is an independent author to look out for, because if he can keep me reading after throwing around verbiage like “Coincidental Logic” then there has got to be something there.

There were professionally painted romance novel covers, a lazy Susan, little old ladies in chains, 1 bout of agoraphobia, 1 eclair induced diabetic coma, and the most important… a lost love.

Don’t let the title fool you, this one is an independent keeper.

Happy reading my fellow Kindle-ites and remember: God made calculators for a reason.

[Pam · Rating 3 out of 5]

An odd couple....a mathematics professor and a romance novelist with writer’s block. Interesting….but it’s easy to get bogged down with the math (and I really like math), so you’ll probably find yourself skimming a bit.
I purchased Do the Math by Saint James. The book store clerk thought it was a strange book for a book club. It was....wrong book