The Time of Our Singing: A Novel Paperback – January 1, 2004

I have participated in classical music as an amateur my entire life, and worked professionally in the field for four decades; they are different experiences. Up to now, the novel that most completely captured both the love-affair of the amateur and the exacting discipline of the performer has been  AN EQUAL MUSICl  by Vikram Seth, set in the world of chamber music. But this 2003 novel by Richard Powers eclipses even that beacon. Beginning with the astounding competition win by a young American singer, Jonah Strom, in 1961, and then using the next 200 pages to trace the path that led him there, this is a book so totally immersed in music that the words themselves become a musical instrument, and the descriptions of formal concerts or jamming around the piano at home more exciting than the sex or action scenes of most other writers. So totally does Powers understand the life of an aspiring vocalist and the special world of a music conservatory (my own habitat for forty years), that it comes as a shock when he finally makes an error almost 400 pages in (details in the comment section). But any flaws are tiny; this is a masterpiece.Jonah is accompanied in his recitals by his brother Joey, who narrates the book. The strength of this is that Jonah's talent is described, not from the point of view of his audience or fans, but through the fear and excitement of somebody trying to ski down the musical mountain beside him, responding to his impulsive turns, sharing the adrenalin of his impossible descent. The downside, though not apparent until much later, is that when Jonah no longer has the spotlight and Joey emerges as the protagonist of his own book, some of the light is lost -- but we have seen this often enough before: think  MOBY DICK , THE GREAT GATSBY , and  ALL THE KING'S MEN . Though only Jonah has the star temperament, he and Joey are both musical prodigies, formed from parlor games in which parents and children alike would combine tunes from Lassus to Loesser in a quodlibet of improvised counterpoint. When the book ends with similar jam session on a much larger scale in an inner-city school in Oakland, California -- another magnificent set piece -- the musical homecoming is poignant.For this is also a book about race. Jonah and Joey's parents met through one of those iconic moments where music and race intersect, at the celebrated concert by black mezzo-soprano Marian Anderson on the Mall in Washington in 1939. David is a recent Jewish refugee, a theoretical physicist taken onto the faculty at Columbia, where he would become peripherally involved in the Manhattan Project. Delia is the daughter of a black Philadelphia physician, a graduate of Howard University, and an aspiring singer in her own right. I thought I knew about the sorry racial history of this country, but Powers brings it home with the force of revelation how intense the bigotry was in the middle decades of the century, and how foolhardy such a marriage would have been. The Stroms' idealized wish to raise their children beyond color only presented each of them with an ambiguity that they would take the rest of their lives to work out: Jonah, who could almost pass for white; Joey, who struggles to pass for black; and their younger sister Ruth, who takes the most radical steps of all. One of the things I most admire about Powers is his ability to bring major events close into the wings without them ever taking over the stage, and to forge a chain of events that serve as defining moments for the other America: the Anderson concert, Hiroshima, Watts, and the two great marches on Washington. It is an astounding book for a white writer even to attempt, let alone bring off with such authenticity.Perhaps Powers is over-ambitious and tries to include too much. His writing, though brilliant throughout, is often too dense for easy reading, too dependent on the special jargon of music or mathematics. Not all his attempts to work through his racial theme in musical terms pay off. But when he manages to pull it all together, as he does remarkably often, he is simply superb. So let me end with his description of the congregation at the funeral of the boys' mother:"How many gradations did anyone see? This polytonal, polychordal piece played for a stone-deaf audience who heard not tonic and dominant, and were pretty shaky even picking out those two. But all the pitches in the chromatic scale had turned out for my mother, and many of the microtones between."

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.

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.

It's very difficult not to be impressed with this novel. Depth, breadth, some highly affecting writing about the emotional power of music, a complex,satisfying structure, trenchant analysis of race and US social problems. Here comes the but. There's a passage where Powers talks about a composer having too many peaks and not enough valleys. That's often what I felt about this book. In fact it's often what I feel about a lot of American novels. Every sentence is so....overstuffed. Every action is so vital. Every comment so pregnant. You long for a character to have a cup of tea or pick their nose or say something pointless. Like, you know, real people do. Roth is the same. These powerful, brilliant characters with their historic lives on a Polaris trajectory. At least Pynchon is often funny and ridiculous and throwaway. But these other guys (and they are all guys aren't they) - all seem to be hell bent on out muscling eachother. Shock and awe, baby. Strangely it makes me think less of Powers' critique of America....his book (and I haven't read the others) is so AMERICAN...big, flashy, self important, overpowering. I shouldn't carp. We need serious, thought provoking writers. America definitely needs them. It's just I sometimes wonder if they need their hearing checked.

Excellent writer....a long book ...dident finish it....but someday might get back

This book is wonderful and Richard Powers is a very clever author.His knowledge is truly amazing and he is a true polymath.The story is thought provoking and I loved the twist in the tale, it was very unexpected.

'The Time of our Singing' hardly needs more commendation than it has had in other reviews here. There is one theme I wanted to comment on specifically.Many people find music a particularly precious gift, and Richard Powers has an astonishing way of evoking the joy of creating and hearing music in a way that I have never encountered before. Many passages in the book brought a thrill very similar to that of listening to the greatest of music.The author's profound knowledge of every genre of music, of american history, of the physics of time, of culture and civil rights are breath-taking, and yet this erudition is merely a backdrop to a human story of great subtlety and observation.I read this book some months ago, and it still haunts me. I will read it again soon. The problem is that I keep giving my copy of it to friends. I have bought more copies of this book than any other!