Customer Reviews

The Time of Our Singing: A Novel

5 star:		(25)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

...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

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.

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

As a fervent classical music-lover and voracious reader, I have read many novels over the years that had music as a background. One immediately thinks of Vikram Seth's 'An Equal Music,' which was fine, and a wonderful debut novel, 'Disturbance of the Inner Ear,' by Joyce Hackett.

I've just finished one that is head and shoulders above either of those mentioned: 'The Time of Our Singing,' by one of our greatest living novelists (and I don't say that lightly), Richard Powers. I've read all his books ever since my daughter gave me a copy of 'The Gold Bug Variations' (which itself has an awful lot of music in it; and yes, that pun that is more than just a catchy title).

The book's theme, if one can say it is just one thing, is what it's like to be of mixed race in America (and in the latter pages, in the Old World). I won't bore you with a plot outline. I will say that there is not a page that doesn't have some reference to music, primarily classical, although there are some pages that refer to gospel songs, popular music, jazz, even smoky bar music. The writer never puts a foot wrong; he obviously is a music-maker himself. There is no other way, I think, he could have written such detailed, emotionally right passages about making music. The only solecism I detected in 600+ pages was a reference, in passing, to Simon Estes as a tenor. As far as I know he has always sung as a bass-baritone.

The characters are Powers's most appealing. The plot has more twists than a Rocky Mountain switchback. The prose is poetic in its evocativeness. And we CARE about what happens.

I believe that this is Powers's best book - and again I say this as a fervent admirer of his 'Plowing the Dark,' 'The Gold Bug Variations,' and 'Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance,' as well as 'Galatea 2.2.'

NOW: Scroll down and read Francis McInerney's customer review. It is brilliant.

The Time of Our Singing is filled with Richard Powers' usual ambitious and startling gumbo of history and science (how the future and the past collaborate themselves into existence in this novel is utterly thrilling), but Singing rises above his other remarkable novels, I believe, because of the characters who come so alive in these pages. They're all deeply flawed individuals who still elicit the reader's interest and sympathy. Their wounds are so familiar, steeped in and beyond race, and I wanted them to be better than they were, kinder, happier, and yet people are who they are, and it's the gap between could and should, want to and can't that give these characters such life.
David Strom and Delia Daley fall enough in love to ignore their racial divide, but the world is unwilling to forgive them--or their children. Though the parents try to forge their childrens' strength in the making of music, this talented family can't hold together their own song. Poor Joseph is paralyzed by his devotion to his gifted brother, Jonah, who in turn treats Joseph to off-handed, casual cruelty. Sister Ruth is treated almost as an afterthought, and so rejects one family and forges another. Meanwhile, history begins to pick them off, one by one.
A tragic, haunting story--not only of a family but of our country, as well--and yet oddly hopeful. Throughout the sweep of this marvelous novel these complex characters held me, and now I find they won't let me go.

It is hard to find a book that expresses the miracle of understanding music as well as this one. To know what it feels like to hear beyond the notes, to innately comprehend he composer's sentiment, is something most people will never realize, and in "The Time of Our Singing," Richard Powers brings most of us mortals about as close as we'll ever get to that sublime experience. His new novel is a big, involving story of music, love, and race, three entrancing elements that lead to a good read.

The music element is the most successful in the Strom family saga. German-Jewish physicist David Strom meets African-American singer Delia Daley at Marian Anderson's landmark 1939 outdoor concert at the Lincoln Memorial. They marry despite her family's objections, and the children they raise grow up immersed in music. The oldest, Jonah, has talent that is undeniable. The second, Joseph, has the talent without the temperament. The youngest, Ruth, immerses herself in the black activist movement. The three Stroms grow up on an awkward place along the color line at a time when everything having to do with color was dynamite.

This is the most successful of Powers' novels in that it combines accessibility with his exciting strength of ideas. You can certainly pick at a few things about characterization and the placement of characters in the path of too many historical events, but overall it is a very satisfying book and a great deal of thought-provoking pleasure will be found between its covers.

A dazzling, dense, ingeniously constructed and beautifully written novel, The Time of Our Singing is, perhaps, the first truly great novel of the new century.
It tells the story of the black Philadelphian Daley family and the marriage of their daughter to a white Jewish emigre in the 1940s and charts the fortunes of their life together, and, most crucially their children. Set against the backdrop of the emerging civil rights movement, it is never judgemental in tone or an overtly political book, but it conveys its message with beauty and subtlety.

The prose is quite simply beautiful. Though the text is dense, and the book long, Powers never descends into the sort of vainglorious obscurity of other American novellists, such as Don DeLillo. Everything has a purpose, nothing - in more than 600 pages - is there unnecesserily. I normally guzzle down books in a day or so, but found myself savouring this one, almost hoping that it would never end. Alas, it did, but now at least I can turn my attention to Powers' other works.

I can't state my admiration for this book highly enough, but buy it now, and you can tell your grandchildren that you read a classic within a couple of years of its publication. It's that good.

If Jonah Strom has a voice that "could make heads of state repent," surely this story of Richard Powers could likewise make the Klan relent. Nothing in my experience of literature, history, or sociology argues so eloquently and dispassionately, so evocatively and palatably to the audience that most needs convincing, against the evils of racism. This novel is far more than a polemic however. It is writing and story-telling at its finest, an argument in and of itself that the novel is not only not dead, but remains as necessary and powerful a tool as it was in the days of Zola and Dickens. The tragedy is that this singular novel should have sprung from the imagination of a writer as obscure as Richard Powers, and will never receive the attention, nor the readership, it merits. It easily deserves the highest honors the literary world has to offer, and one would hope that it receives them. Only then will it gain its rightful place at the heart of the desperately needed discussion that no one of any prominence has had the courage to initiate.

Richard Powers is not the sort of author who rests on his laurels and his talent. Quite the contrary, Powers experiments with style, structure, and time in ways often experimental and his work follows a range of subjects so wide and well researched one wonders how he finds time to write. Fortunate for all readers, Powers finds the time, and with each new work offers his fans an experience both new and delightful. In Gain Powers ran two parallel stories from different perspectives, one the biography of a company spanning over a century and another spanning the death of a single woman victim to the company's actions. In Galatea 2.0 Powers writes of consciousness, identity, and what is real. Now with the Time of Our Singing he explores race, time, identity, and how music can transcend or fail to transcend all that divides us.

Time of Our Singing follows a plot intriguing from the start. A Jewish refuge physicist before WWII meets, falls in love with and marries an African-American woman of great intellect and compassion. In a society unable to accept either their relationship or the children they bring into the world, the couple decides to create their own culture based on their common love of music, through which they first met. What follows is a tale following the lives of this family and its three children, each of whom carries an extraordinary gift for music moving through the twisting and often torturous landscape of the second half of the 20th century. Powers narrates the story through the eyes of the middle son, a narrator as compassionate and gripping as any of recent memory.

This being a Richard Powers novel, the amount of research boggles the mind and I often felt like a failure as a reader for my inability to understand every musical reference. Fortunately, the gifted prose brings the varied music almost to life, at least as far as possible for words that lay on a page without an accompanying recording or note. At times lyrical words dance off the page. The themes of the novel cover such a range that it almost boggles the mind. The complexities of race relations comes under deep study, using the interesting idea of two half-African Americans, one destined to be one of the great singers of his age, winding their way through the almost all white world of Classical music. Powers also uses the father and his area of study, time, to almost magical effect, linking the various threads of the story together in a way that may leave some readers arriving at the last page only to begin again at the first sentence in order to better understand the whole of this fine tapestry.

Many critics describe Powers as one of the great American authors of his generation. Given his gift for producing exquisite work at astounding speed, such praise hardly seems mere hyperbole.

"The Time of Our Singing" by Richard Powers is brilliant. It is also, at times, overwrought, repetitious, and boring.

Historical references (having to do with race relations) from the 1930's to the 1990's are woven into the story of a "mixed"
family. The white,Jewish man who married a black woman produced three children who form the heart of the novel. The two brothers and their sister are extremely musical, and the interplay between time, musical and otherwise; mathematics (the father is a professor of math); and life experiences, draws the reader into the story.
The brilliance of this work comes mostly from the prose. Much of it is written in a beautifully developed style that includes word-play in its highest form. It reminds one of Stoppard's plays. In addition, thoughts expressed are often eloquent and spellbinding in their originality.

The main reason this book does not receive 5 stars, hinges on the very topic that develops the book's theme. The 600+ pages could have fit nicely into 400+ pages...there would not be the repetition, but at the same time, the time it took to do all the reading would be compacted, and the author's obsession with time itself would have been compromised.

Nontheless, the writing is great, the story is interesting and the characters are believable. Read it.