The Time of Our Singing: A Novel
by Richard Powers
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Book Summary Information
Author: Richard PowersEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2004-01-01
ISBN: 0312422180
Number of pages: 640
Publisher: Picador
Book Reviews of The Time of Our Singing: A Novel
Book Review: "If there is no single now, then there can't have ever been a single then."
Summary: 5 Stars
As sprawling, ambitious, and messy as a Russian epic, Richard Powers's "The Time of Our Singing" weds (literally) two of his early personal interests: his adolescent training as a musician and his collegiate work in physics. He has joined these two disparate halves in a married couple: David Strom, a somewhat befuddled and idealistic German Jewish scientist, and Delia Daley, an African American vocalist whose talents are thwarted by racism. The results of "their sovereign state of two"--this blending of white and black, science and art, theory and pragmatism--are three children: famed singer Jonah Strom, his older brother and erstwhile accompanist Joseph (who is the novel's narrator), and their hard-as-nails and rebellious baby-sister, Ruth. As the kids grow up, this "hybrid" family attempts to live "beyond race," which in the climate of the 1950s basically means that they are isolated: a sovereign state of five.
What Powers is trying to achieve is both awesome and overwhelming; while both music and time (in its scientific and everyday senses) are central to the plot, his aim (as in all of his fiction) is to show how everything is inter-connected. True, the novel strains with the effort of incorporating most aspects of the civil rights movement of the past 70 years: the Detroit riots, the Black Panthers, the Rodney King beating, the various marches--at least one family member manages to be eyewitness or participant in each historical moment. But, ultimately, events separated by quarter centuries are powerfully brought together: David and Delia meet over a lost boy on the Washington Mall at Marian Anderson's 1939 concert; David, with his daughter at the 1963 March on Washington, points out Anderson, now "an old woman, no voice left, years past her prime"; Joseph accompanies Ruth's two sons to the 1995 Million Man March, where the youngest of the three is momentarily lost. The beauty is how Powers warps time to bring together three events separated by decades, yet sharing a place.
While reading the novel, I was constantly reminded of James Baldwin's "Just Above My Head," which (by coincidence) I had just finished weeks previously. The surface similarities are quite astonishing: both feature musical prodigies who become internationally famous, who flee to Europe to advance their careers, and whose (tragic, lonely) deaths are revealed at the outset; both are narrated by the brothers of the singer-heroes; both feature families raised in Harlem, whose lives weave in and out of the turmoil of the 1950s and 1960s; both feature narratives that skip back and forth across the decades. Powers is able, however, to appropriate Baldwin's great, late work and make it all his own: while Baldwin's realism creates a novel of characters, Powers's formalism produces a novel of ideas. They resemble two movements of the same extraordinary symphony.
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