The Time of Our Singing: A Novel [Paperback]

Richard Powers (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1, 2004

On Easter day, 1939, at Marian Anderson’s epochal concert on the Washington Mall, David Strom, a German Jewish émigré scientist, meets Delia Daley, a young Philadelphia Negro studying to be a singer. Their mutual love of music draws them together, and—against all odds and better judgment—they marry. They vow to raise their children beyond time, beyond identity, steeped only in song. Jonah, Joseph, and Ruth grow up, however, during the Civil Rights era, coming of age in the violent 1960s, and living out adulthood in the racially retrenched late century. Jonah, the eldest, “whose voice could make heads of state repent,” follows a life in his parents’ beloved classical music. Ruth, the youngest, devotes herself to community activism and repudiates the white culture her brother represents. Joseph, the middle child and the narrator of this generation-bridging tale, struggles to find himself and remain connected to them both.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In some respects, Richard Powers's The Time of Our Singing is just a big, absorbing drama about an American family, with the typical ingredients of an immigrant parent and some social obstacles--in this case, a biracial marriage in the Civil Rights era--to be overcome by the talented children. But Powers's lyrical gifts lift this material far above its familiar subject matter. His descriptions of music alone will transport the reader. The Strom family were raised with this common language: "Our parents' Crazed Quotations game played on the notion that every moment's tune had all history's music box for its counterpoint. On any evening in Hamilton Heights, we could jump from organum to atonality without any hint of all the centuries that had died fiery deaths between them." The central figure of this novel is the dazzling Jonah, who makes a life from singing, and who may be the only person around him who regards his racial heritage as irrelevant to his ambitions. Powers's is such a fertile writer, however, that he can't stay with any single story, but plunges into pages and pages of family and social histories. The result is a rambling, resonant, fearless novel that pulls the reader along in its wake. --Regina Marler --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

Powers (Plowing the Dark, etc.) has generated considerable excitement as a novelist of ideas, but as a creator of characters, he is on shakier ground. Here he confronts his weaknesses head-on, crafting a hefty family saga that attempts to probe generational conflicts, sibling rivalries and racial identity. The book follows the mixed-race Strom family through much of the 20th century, from 1939 when German-Jewish physicist David Strom meets Delia Daley, a black, classically trained singer from Philadelphia through the 1990s. The couple marries and has three children: eldest son Jonah, a charismatic, egotistical singing prodigy; Joseph, his self-sacrificing accompanist; and Ruth, the rebel of the family, who becomes a militant black activist. There are two separate strands to the story: one is a third-person chronicle of David and Delia's relationship through the 1940s; the other, narrated by Joseph, is about the brothers' education in the nearly all-white world of classical music and their experience of the civil rights movement as the rest of the country grudgingly catches up to the Stroms' radical experiment. Powers's premise is intriguing, and the plot's architecture is impressive, informed by the notion, from physics, of space-time wrinkles and time curves. Missing, however, are the pulse-quickening vintage-Powers moments in which his discussions of technology and science open up profound existential quandaries. Most of the book is taken up with a prolonged, overdetermined and off-key examination of family relationships and identity struggles. Narrator Joseph is supposed to be eclipsed by his brother, but Powers overshoots the mark: for half the book, Joseph is little more than a pair of eyes and ears. Powers's depiction of how public events filter into individual consciousness can also be surprisingly unimaginative; Joseph periodically runs down a list of current events, using stale, iconic imagery ("our hatless boy president plays touch football on the White House lawn"). Powers deserves credit for taking a risk, but his own experiment reveals his startling tone deafness to the subtle inflections of human experience.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 640 pages
• Publisher: Picador; First Edition. first thus edition (January 1, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312422180
• ISBN-13: 978-0312422189
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.5 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (42 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #318,408 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

47 of 50 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A staggering work of genius..., March 12, 2003

By 

Bob Zeidler (Charlton, MA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Time of Our Singing (Hardcover)

...that is heartbreaking in its beauty and its tragedy. And its hope.

I thought for a long time regarding how best to describe this book in one sentence. In this, I felt as if I had been put in the predicament experienced by a New York Times book reviewer who, two decades ago, in describing a favorite work of literature, wrote "...I find myself nervous, to a degree I don't recall in my past as a reviewer, about failing the work, inadequately describing its brilliance." And, with apologies to another author whose title words I paraphrase above, this is how I choose to describe this powerful new novel.

The overarching theme of the story is race, and what it is like to be black in America (even if that "blackness" is barely apparent and issues of class and culture are largely absent). It is the story of three siblings - two brothers of nearly the same age and a younger sister - flung apart repeatedly by the centripetal force of race and its effect on family and career in the latter half of the 20th century, only to be brought back together time and again by the pressure of events, both familial and racial. Powers uses the subthemes of classical music and contemporary physics to compelling effect in weaving together both the narrative of the siblings (and their family) and the greater story of "being black in America." In the process, he cuts across time, flashing backwards and forwards in the narrative while telling both the story of the siblings and the history of race relations from their parents' generation to the near-present. The latter is dealt with in a series of brilliant set pieces covering every race-relations event of significance over this period, from Marian Anderson's Lincoln Memorial concert of 1939, in defiance of the D.A.R., to the Million Man March more than half-century later; in the process, the story's protagonists appear, "Zelig-like," at the periphery of these events.

Told more "linearly" than Powers's style of cutting back and forth in time, the story is about an interracial couple (he, a German Jewish emigre physicist recently escaped from Nazi Germany, she, a talented black singer without opportunity for a professional career due to color) who choose to rear these siblings "colorless" and home-schooled in their formative years (including intensive attention to music and singing). The choice - largely that of the father - can be read as a well-intentioned but ultimately failing effort to increase racial "entropy," a term from physics that Powers doesn't use explicitely but nonetheless seems to suggest.

The subtheme of music propels the narrative forward. Jonah - the older son - is destined for great things as a singer; he has a voice of such beauty and purity that one like it comes along, at best, once per generation. Joseph - the younger son (by a year), and the story's narrator - is not the talent that Jonah is, but he is the main support backbone - an "enabler" - for Jonah, as well as his accompanist, over much of the tale. Ruth - the sister, younger by a few years - might well have been the greatest of the three in terms of talent, but an early tragic event takes her in an entirely different direction.

Powers uses the physics subtheme to entirely different effect. The nature of time (in the context of the role it plays in Einstein's Theory of Relativity) is brought to into question on the discontinuities in the narrative and the near-repetition of specific events, as if time has the ability to fold back on itself, even repeat itself from an "event standpoint." In one of the better set pieces in the book, Powers places the father and the two boys in The Cloisters (at the northern tip of Manhattan) when they are quite young. This is their first experience at hearing medieval music, and the experience will eventually fold back on itself - decades later - in a way that I found astonishing yet logical.

It needs to be said, too, that that this is not just the story of Jonah, Joseph and Ruth. Or simply the story of "being black in America." As Powers's story unfolds, we see that events have a way of taking their toll on the extended family at whose core are these siblings. Late in the book, there is a passage regarding the maternal grandparents, the male figure of whom had long been estranged from his grandsons due to a severe falling out between himself and their father. When notice of the grandfather's death is passed on to Joseph from his uncle, we find that this estrangement had taken its toll on the grandparents' relationship as well; only at death is a tragic secret revealed.

In a supreme irony, the folding back of time, at the end, finds the gansta rap son of Ruth, grandson of the physicist whose "experiment in racial entropy" gives the story its initial impetus, repeating the path that his grandfather had a half-century before. He listens to Louis Farrakhan, and concludes - with a wisdom far beyond his years, and totally contrary to his demeanor - that Farrakhan's message is all wrong: The arrow of time really flows in only one direction, and that direction is measured by the increase in entropy.

Powers - a polymath for sure - throws an awful lot at the reader, leaving it up to him to sort it all out. But at its best - and the "best" is there page after page - Powers's prose simply leaps off the page. Nowhere is this better than when he describes music and the effect that a perfect voice can have on the human heart and sensibilities. He writes so beautifully about music and the power of the human voice that the pages themselves literally sing.

This is not a book that can be adequately summarized in so few words. It is a great and IMPORTANT book.

Bob Zeidler

30 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Too long for a good song, June 18, 2005

By 

MartinP "MartinP" (Nijmegen, The Netherlands) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: The Time of Our Singing: A Novel (Paperback)

This book was enthusiastically recommended to me by a friend, and the reviews I read of it made me even more eager to read it. Now, having finished it, I find myself rather disappointed, yet somewhat hesitant to give an opinion. The writing itself is of such quality and, often, sheer beauty, and the scope of its themes is so monumental, that I cannot help but admire the writer for his audacity and skill. Of course, likes and dislikes are always matters of taste, but this eventual "dislike" had me wondering if the fault was with this particular reader rather than the novel. Still, the book left me, if not exactly bored, strangely exasperated. It seems to be one of those novels where the story does not evolve naturally from the characters, but where the characters are elaborate mechanisms for dispensing philosophical and political ideas. A suspicion Powers tries to repel by cramming his pages with picturesque and quaint individual detail, and by rehashing the central motives (race, time, music) in a way that verges on the obsessive - bloating this book to a daunting 630 pages in the process.
The Time of Our Singing tells the story of a black woman and a jewish man who decide to marry after meeting at a musical event-slash-antidiscrimination rally. Their mixed marriage is the bane of her parents, and of the central characters in the novel, the two sons and the daughter issueing from their bond. One of the sons grows into a singer of world class stature, while the other is tossed to and fro between the claims made on him by his brother as a fellow-musician, and by his sister as a fellow black person. After the tragic death of the mother, their scientist father is incapable of keeping his family on track, as he drifts off into an esoteric world of physics centring on the idea that time is directionless and that everything is present at the same time - a metaphor Powers takes just one step too far towards the end of the book. The singer brother eventually ditches his solocareer to join an early music group in Belgium, while the sister becomes a pro-black activist. The insurmountable problem of race is at the core of it all, and is elaborately dished out in the stories of no less than 4 generations. Add to that lots (lots!) of talk about music, and uncommon levels of musical accomplishment in so many characters as to defy believability; - and put all that against the backdrop of half a century of racial confusion in the US. Then, maybe, you may understand something of my feeling that this book is trying to deal with a few Big Themes too many for its own good.
Things are not helped by the very obvious desire of Powers to be profound and moving, an aim in which he is defeated by the way he lays it on way too thick. Sorry as I am to say it, page 630 came as somewhat of a relief, and his characters left me quite unmoved, even if his writing itself at times didn't.

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Quite Rewarding Journey, April 13, 2003

By 

Bookreporter (New York, New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Time of Our Singing (Hardcover)

Readers of Richard Powers's breakout novel, THE GOLD BUG VARIATIONS, already know that no one in contemporary letters writes about music or science with the depth of feeling or grace of metaphor that Powers brings to the subjects. THE GOLD BUG VARIATIONS, Powers's third and breakout novel, conflated J.S. Bach's Goldberg Variations with the cracking of the genetic code (as well as with Edgar Allen Poe's story "The Gold-Bug"). Powers returns to music and science in his eighth novel, THE TIME OF OUR SINGING, this time using them as an entryway to reflections on the role of race in the lives of individuals and American society.

Through two story lines that ultimately intersect, the novel recounts the history of the Strom family, a family remarkable for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the innate musical talent that finds its greatest --- or at least most public --- outlet in Jonah Strom, a vocal prodigy who makes the singing of chamber music his life and livelihood. Jonah is the eldest son of a Jewish physicist who left Germany to escape the Nazis and an African-American woman from Philadelphia who met on the Mall in Washington D.C. during the historic performance by Marian Anderson on Easter day 1939. Improbably, the two fell in love and their union produced three offspring: Jonah, Joseph --- who narrates much of the novel and is Jonah's accompanist --- and Ruth, who finds her identity in the more radical arm of the civil rights movement and rejects her brothers' love and performance of European music.

The novel's primary concern may be the ways in which racial identity influences the course of a person's life, but along the way, Powers offers remarkable descriptions of music and the process of creating it: "This is how I see my brother, forever. He is twenty; it's December 1961. One moment, the Erl-King is hunched on my brother's shoulder, breathing the promise of a blessed deliverance. In the next, some trap-door opens in the warp of the air and my brother is elsewhere, teasing out Dowland of all things, a bit of ravishing sass for this stunned lieder crowd, who can't grasp the web that slips over them. He touches his tongue to his hard palate, presses on the cylinder of air behind it until his tongue tips over his front teeth with a dwarf explosion, that fine-point puff of tuh that expands, pulling the vowel behind it, spreading like a slow-filmed cloud, to ta to tahee to time to transcend the ear's entire horizon, until the line becomes all it describes. . ."

The nature of time itself plays a key role in the book, as David Strom's scientific theorizing explores that very subject. Indeed, the theories of time he presents in the novel --- rendered as beautifully as the musical descriptions --- lay the groundwork for the one "trick" Powers could be accused of playing on the reader. The plot point cannot be described without revealing too much about the novel's carefully constructed end, but the trick itself is the work of a master illusionist rather than of a literary con man, inspiring wonder rather than disappointment.

Occasionally, the characters -- especially Ruth -- seem somewhat hollow, as discussions about racial identity threaten to become lists of talking points rather than realistic, messy conversations. Still, Powers has created a fascinating family that, through its various members, tries a multiplicity of ways to come to grips with what it means to be black, white or in between. To that end, Powers also conjures up compelling portraits and retellings of historical events, including the delivery of Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech, the Watts riots, the aftermath of the Rodney King verdict and the Million Man March.

THE TIME OF OUR SINGING is a lengthy, slow read that does not have quite the narrative force of some of Powers's earlier novels (THREE FARMERS ON THEIR WAY TO A DANCE, THE GOLD BUG VARIATIONS, GALATEA 2.2). Nevertheless, the novel is unfailingly beautiful and the ideas it considers are endlessly fascinating, rendering the journey a rewarding one indeed.

--- Reviewed by Rob Cline