The Study of Racialism

gemini072 · Moderator Joined: 27 Nov 2004 {Posts: 2942 }

Richard Powers' The Time of Our Singing: Exhilarating, Exasperating, Exhausting
Feb 09 '03

Author's Product Rating

Pros
Using classical music as a springboard, Powers surgically dissects America's race relations.

Cons
He uses cold, sanitary knives during that surgery.

The Bottom Line
This is Richard Powers' most accessible novel. That doesn't mean it's easy reading. It's long, complex, but ultimately beautiful as a thousand-voiced opera.

Full Review

When you emerge on the other side of Richard Powers' operatic novel The Time of Our Singing, you'll be shaking from exhilaration or exasperation. Either way, you'll be exhausted.

Make no mistake, Powers' novel about race and classical music is big—not only in its more than 600 word-dense pages, but also in the breadth and depth of the themes the author attempts to contain between the two covers. We could expect nothing less from Powers whose other novels tackled such unlikely subjects as molecular genetics (The Goldbug Variations), cognitive computers (Galatea 2.2), chemicals, capitalism and cancer (Gain) and a Beirut hostage whose story merges with that of computer programmers working on a virtual-reality chamber (Plowing the Dark). Powers is an intellectual grab-bag; and though at times he comes across as an evangelist for the pocket-protector set, The Time of Our Singing should gain him a larger audience. It's his most accessible work to date, comparable to Don DeLillo's multi-dimensioned Underworld.

The Time of Our Singing follows four generations of the Strom family as it makes its way through the twentieth century. Delia, a young black woman studying classical music, and Joseph, a German Jewish refugee physicist, meet on the Washington Mall during Marian Anderson's prejudice-defying 1939 concert. Both are as enraptured by each other as they are the soprano's voice warbling from the Lincoln Memorial. Against the country's prevailing attitude and Delia's disgruntled parents, they fall in love and marry.

Their three children—Jonah, Joseph and Ruth, each progressively darker in skin tone—grow up in a house whose patriarch spends his days trying to formulate a theory about relativity and "dual time" and whose matriarch schools them in song designed to liberate them from the shackles of this country's history. Delia and Joseph want to raise their children "beyond race" but unwittingly turn their entire family into an experiment which eventually fractures the safe world they've tried to construct. The youngest child, Ruth, joins the Black Panther during the turbulent '60s, while the two lighter-skinned boys find success in the white man's world of classical music.

Jonah, whose tenor voice is "so pure, it could make heads of state repent," takes his talents to a music conservatory, then later to a career recording early music. Joseph, his accompanist, is swept along in the wake of his older brother. He narrates much of the novel, serving as our tour guide through the family's opera-worthy turbulence. His talents at the keyboard are just as good as Jonah's vocal chords, but he quietly smothers his ambition in favor of fostering his brother's career. It's sad and agonizing for the reader to witness Joseph's self-suppression, but it also serves as the novel's most dramatic focal point.

The novel moves restlessly across history like a needle skipping back and forth across a scratched record, opening in 1961 as Jonah sings Dowland's "Time Stands Still." Throughout the book, moments are paused in the rush of history. Powers keeps circling back to key events in the family timeline as if the characters were caught in a kinked time warp. "Prophecy just remembers in advance what the past has long been saying," Joseph writes. "All we ever do is fulfill the beginning." Powers neatly (though not effortlessly) loops the novel backward in its final pages as we watch past and present merge.

Midway through the odyssey, after Jonah's professional debut, the New York Times calls him "one of the finest Negro recitalists this country has ever produced," a review that rankles him with its backhanded racism. He turns down an offer by the Metropolitan Opera to play a part referred to only as "the Negro." Jonah wants to believe he's breaking barriers like his Black Panther sister, but 1960s America—at least the white cultured crust where he dwells—keeps shoving him back into its neatly-dimensioned race box. "I won't be the Caruso of black America. The Sidney Poitier of opera," he insists to Joseph. He wants to be "something other than hue-man."

Such is the thorny racial thicket Powers navigates in The Time of Our Singing. The effort of cutting his way through the bramble is often too loud and obvious. The high points of civil rights history—Anderson's concert, Emmett Till's murder, Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech, the Watts riots, the L.A. riots, the Million Man March—are all there as if Powers was writing with a checklist beside the computer. And that's when he's not objectifying what's happening to his characters with coffee, cream, and salt and pepper shakers—a painfully clunky trick that stands out in writing that often vibrates, hums, sizzles and explodes like an out-of-control firework—like this paragraph describing Marian Anderson's concert in Washington D.C.:

The crowd condenses. It's standing room only, flowing the length of the reflecting pool and down West Potomac Park. The floor of this church is grass. The columns of this nave are budding trees. The vault above, an Easter sky. The deeper Delia wades in toward the speck of grand piano, the stickpin corsage of microphones where her idol will stand, the thicker this celebration. The press of massed desire lifts and deposits her, helpless, a hundred yards upstream, facing the Tidal Basin. Schoolbook cherry trees swim up to fill her eyes, their blossoms mad. They wave the dazzle of their pollen bait and, in this snowstorm of petals, fuse with every Easter when they ever unfolded their promissory color.

Powers is attempting something big here—a book that teems and buzzes like a crowd on the Washington Mall—and he's grasping at many different strands (race, family politics, music, the physics of time and space), trying to tie everything together between two covers. By its exhilarating, exasperating, exhausting conclusion, it's difficult to say whether Powers himself is able to reach a conclusion about race relations in America, but one thing's for certain: for more than 600 pages he sings beautiful harmony in voices that weave and thread like helixes of tone.