Rating: 
Summary: Challenge and pleasure.
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Homeschooling
Review: Joseph accompanies his brother Jonah on the piano. At age 20 Jonah is named America's next voice. Jonah has a three and a half octave voice. Joey feels he is average as a musician and his brother is outstanding, the possessor of an unearthly voice. The father, David Strom, is a German Jewish physicist. The mother is African American. Jonah attends the Boyleston Academy of Music on a full scholarship. It is now the back story, 1939. Marian Anderson was turned away by the DAR Hall and sings at the Washington Mall. Delia, the mother, is living in her father's house in Philadelphia. She wants to go to Washington to hear Marian Anderson sing. David Strom is present, too, a guest of George Gamow. Strom wanders in the crowd, lost inside a Social Realist drawing. Jonah went from being homeschooled to the Boyleston Academy in 1952. His brother Joey follows him there the next year. It turns out that Jonah had probably been tormented as the only child of color. Jonah and Joey had to struggle to keep up with their classmates. Jonah becomes friends with an outcast girl in the school, the daughter of professional musicians. She conveys to Jonah much musical lore and theory. Jonah's boy soprano voice will change. His voice breaks at the Berkshire Festival in Orff's CARMINA BURANA. He ends the piece masterfully, a tenor. Delia's father trained to be a physician at Howard. The author recounts the story of Emmett Till. His body goes north by train. Jonah's laugh at age 14 had no bitter highlights yet. The father of Jonas and Joey travels to Boston to tell them their mother is dead. The furnace in their house exploded. Later Jonah and Joey attend Julliard. When they were children their grandfather and father became estranged over the atom bomb and issues of race. When the third child, Ruth, is born Delia does not have the comfort of her own mother's help. At Julliard Jonah comes under the jursidiction of the two star vocal teachers who have different views. After graduation Joey and Jonah work at a studio in Harlem preparing for the big contest. Later the brothers live on Bleeker Street. Fame catches Jonah when he is 24. The novel continues until the time of his death in Europe. Jonah goes to Europe in 1968 and Ruth marries in 1970. Later Joey goes to Europe, and after Jonah has sung opera in Milan and Paris, he joins an early music group in Flanders in which Jonah is involved. When Ruth's husband dies and he meets his now aged maternal grandfather again, Joey leaves Europe to travel to California with Ruth and his nephews. He becomes a school teacher. The book is challenging and vibrant. In addition to the music, there are a number of scenes involving politics and family harmony or disharmony. In many respects this work is more realistic, less utopian, than some of the other novels of this writer.
Rating:
Summary: Homeschooling
Review: Joseph accompanies his brother Jonah on the piano. At age 20 Jonah is named America's next voice. Jonah has a three and a half octave voice. Joey feels he is average as a musician and his brother is outstanding, the possessor of an unearthly voice. The father, David Strom, is a German Jewish physicist. The mother is African American. Jonah attends the Boyleston Academy of Music on a full scholarship. It is now the back story, 1939. Marian Anderson was turned away by the DAR Hall and sings at the Washington Mall. Delia, the mother, is living in her father's house in Philadelphia. She wants to go to Washington to hear Marian Anderson sing. David Strom is present, too, a guest of George Gamow. Strom wanders in the crowd, lost inside a Social Realist drawing. Jonah went from being homeschooled to the Boyleston Academy in 1952. His brother Joey follows him there the next year. It turns out that Jonah had probably been tormented as the only child of color. Jonah and Joey had to struggle to keep up with their classmates. Jonah becomes friends with an outcast girl in the school, the daughter of professional musicians. She conveys to Jonah much musical lore and theory. Jonah's boy soprano voice will change. His voice breaks at the Berkshire Festival in Orff's CARMINA BURANA. He ends the piece masterfully, a tenor. Delia's father trained to be a physician at Howard. The author recounts the story of Emmett Till. His body goes north by train. Jonah's laugh at age 14 had no bitter highlights yet. The father of Jonas and Joey travels to Boston to tell them their mother is dead. The furnace in their house exploded. Later Jonah and Joey attend Julliard. When they were children their grandfather and father became estranged over the atom bomb and issues of race. When the third child, Ruth, is born Delia does not have the comfort of her own mother's help. At Julliard Jonah comes under the jursidiction of the two star vocal teachers who have different views. After graduation Joey and Jonah work at a studio in Harlem preparing for the big contest. Later the brothers live on Bleeker Street. Fame catches Jonah when he is 24. The novel continues until the time of his death in Europe. Jonah goes to Europe in 1968 and Ruth marries in 1970. Later Joey goes to Europe, and after Jonah has sung opera in Milan and Paris, he joins an early music group in Flanders in which Jonah is involved. When Ruth's husband dies and he meets his now aged maternal grandfather again, Joey leaves Europe to travel to California with Ruth and his nephews. He becomes a school teacher. The book is challenging and vibrant. In addition to the music, there are a number of scenes involving politics and family harmony or disharmony. In many respects this work is more realistic, less utopian, than some of the other novels of this writer.
Rating: 
Summary: disappointing effort
Review: Powers' latest novel is a disappointment. A novel of race and music, of two brothers from a mixed marriage, it is leaden and repetitious. How does one describe music? Powers can only pile up the superlatives as he again and again celebrates the effect of Jonah's voice on his audience. We get it.
Several incidents stretch belief. Would a mixed couple really be spat on and reviled in upper Manhattan in the fifties? Would Jonah really ride into the Watts riot for a closer look?
The best parts are a brief account of the Till murder and the account of the meeting of David and Delia at the Easter, 1939 Anderson concert at the Lincoln Memorial.
Powers has no sense of humor and no sense of irony. His last two novels are far less engrossing than "Gain" and his best, "The Gold Bug Variations."
Reviewers seem to give him credit for taking on a large issue, race in America. But read "Atonement" for a good novel!
Rating: 
Summary: A Quite Rewarding Journey
Review: 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
Rating:
Summary: Another stab at the G.A. novel
Review: Richard Powers has never been afraid of the big themes, from his 1985 debut, Three Farmers on their Way to a Dance , onwards. In that novel, he extrapolated the first world war from the eponymous photograph in the Sander Gallery, New York; since then he has tackled - and these bare summaries do not begin to do justice to the richness of his imagination - genetics, artificial intelligence, capitalism, the whole corpus of English literature, hostages in Lebanon and virtual reality. And not necessarily in different novels. "Nothing can take place in this century without some coincident event linking it into a conspiratorial whole," he declares in Three Farmers , and although this really is a clever way of letting the novelist slip in through the back door of history before grabbing it by the vitals, he does it very well indeed. In The Time of Our Singing , this orchestration is almost seamless. It's the story of two brothers, Jonah and Joseph, the former a singer and the latter, for most of the novel, his accompanist. Joseph is a good enough accompanist, but Jonah has a voice of extraordinary, arresting beauty: "my brother sings to save the good and make the wicked take their own lives". Or: "like silk on obsidian", or quite a few other remarkable similes that would have exhausted any lesser writer. We get the point fairly early on, but it can't be repeated often enough: Jonah's voice is good to the point of unearthliness.
Rating:
Summary: Nothing Trumps Time
Review: Richard Powers is an exceptional writer who follows no one, not even his own single muse, his writing is too varied. He writes like no other author I can think of, his work is unique. I have read all his published work save one, and this is by far the most ambitious in terms of its human element. His are not just characters dealing with a conflict, but people defined by, tortured, terrified and completely lost by the concept of race, and how their own racial blend or puzzle structure, define and are used to define them. There is no peace Black and white is not complex enough; the original couple additionally brings the paradox of differing religions to the racial mix and then let these ingredients, that become demons when let loose, to burden their children. The meeting of the couple that catalyzes the tale takes place at a concert at The Lincoln Memorial, located there, for the female singer of color cannot perform elsewhere, a First Lady must step in and do what is right, what everyone else fails to do. Race trumps love Classical music, white European music brings this couple together that will start a family of unique and exceptionally gifted children. Yet no amount of talent, no shade of pigmentation however light, allows them the freedom to be judged, as one man who had a dream so badly wanted. A flawless voice cannot be so considered on its own because of the music it sings, when is white not white, one-half, one drop, is there anything that can lay claim to purely white? Self versus caste versus race As the children grow they become incredibly diverse, ranging from a brilliant international performer, to a confused middle sibling who is nearly as talented, and either uniquely lost, or allows it to show when his siblings do not, and the youngest who becomes a militant civil rights crusader, who embraces violence as she rejects her closest family. The issue of race becomes so violent and divisive that accusing someone of complicity of murder even when the accused is a family member and the victim another member of the family, her anger knows no bounds. A mother in law tries to explain the frustration her husband feels when watching what he views as a naive attitude at best, and a dangerous one at worst, the idea to raise children without having them allow themselves to be defined by race. The comment that is shared in an attempt to explain is, He don't like you scrubbing these leopards spotless. And that gets to the heart of the book, what is the definition of race when the lines are literally no longer viewed as black and white, even if pure black and pure white have been nothing but a charade for generations? On one extreme there is the attitude that one drop of black blood means white is gone, and then there is the issue of passing for white, or insisting on being black even though a person is lighter than some whites. I am not doing justice to this book, and I am afraid I am making it sound like a series of clichés; nothing could be father than the truth. I spent many weeks with this book, and read many portions more than once. It is very dense, complex, and is full of frustration, just as the subject it attempts to deal with demands. There are few authors that could attempt such a book. Richard Powers does so and brings the world of music in to the story as a primary character, a character that has appeared in other works he has written. This author is not a writer who does variations on a theme, to say he is great at ideas and poor on people, is to suggest the absurd. His works tend to be lengthy, and they need to be. The man is not writing with the goal of making bestseller's lists, and his books would be castrated if they attempted to make a movie from one. Richard Powers is amongst those who write books first, last and always. He produces massive, thought provoking books that are not intended, nor could they be adapted to the big or small screens. They are meant to be read and kept between covers. He is one of the finest writers working today.
Rating:
Summary: The Time of Powers' Singing
Review: Richard Powers' latest literary spell cast over the book world takes the shape of a blanket of music and race relations. In the past, he has used DNA (The Goldbug Variations, 1991), computer break throughs (Galatea 2.2, 1995), and the white canvas of human imagination (Plowing the Dark, 2001) to express his intense fascination with love and the human condition. In The Time of Our Singing, however, he uses the will of music to tears through the layers of love as a universal theme. Set on a bed of history, the flowers of love flourish and suffer through years of social weathering.
The set up is easy: at a civil rights march, a young black woman (Delia) meets a German Jewish physicist (David). Naturally, the pair falls madly in love over the midst of the wondrous vocals of the extraordinary Marian Anderson. Their eventual children, Joseph, Jonah, and Ruth, are the product of an interracial marriage in the middle of the century. Conveniently enough, the kids inherit the best of their parents precious genes: Joseph is a discovered musical prodigy with the voice of an angel, while the less talented Jonas learns to accompany his brother on the piano. Ruth is left behind, content with her budding misanthropy and anger at a world that treats her like a second class citizen. Choosing to claim her African-American roots, she holds her parents accountable for their actions. Ruth is convinced that her mother was the victim of a racist attack against her parents mixed marriage. Jonah finds himself immersed in the white world as a renowned singer, while Joseph straddles the lines in an insurmountable tension that builds throughout the book like a crescendo.
The Time of Our Singing illustrates Powers' concerns in its title. He is fascinated with the concept of time, as well as American historic time. The book also reads like a musical composition, subject to the composer's, or in this case the narrator's, fancy. Shifting to and from the past and present like a smooth metronome, Joseph clearly demonstrates the form and content when he says that, "time may turn out to be quantized, as discontinuous as the notes in a melody. It may be passed back and forth, carried along by subatomic chronons as discreet as the fabric of matter." And, sure enough, it speeds up and slows down to match the madness of the Stroms' drama. After the sudden fire, tragedy begins to wash over the already cataclysmic family: "Time, that block of standing evers, that reversible dependent variable, had turned on him. He no longer knew how much was left. From the moment of the fire until his own death, he gave himself up to finding time and breaking it." The concept of time is paramount to David, and manifested in Powers' construction of his epic book.
Powers also weaves in threads of history, sewing beads of truth throughout the novel in precise characters like Albert Einstein, Louis Farrakhan, and Eleanor Roosevelt. Jonas and Joseph seem to collide with important historical events each time they turn around. Still, one allows Powers to make these convenient turns along the way. His version of the brutal murder of Emmet Till, a young black teenager from the South in the 1950's is narrated in a cold voice with little passion. However, Powers creates beauty in his simple words. His terrifyingly moving account of the race-related violence succeeds without leaning on sentimental phrasing or flowery language. He also ties in the essentials of the race tension, such as the death of Martin Luther King Jr. and the Million Man March. Yet, Powers tries to create a timelessness throughout his when and wheres. When the reader is immersed in the race riots, Power wants him to feel the power more than just see the facts. Eventually, the family acknowledges David's studies, for "of course there is no time. Of course there's nothing but standing change."
Therein lies the problem. Powers is so smug about his knowledge that he begins to thematically contradict hiimself. In the midst of his historical celebraty cake walk, he attemps to push forward the notion that love, especially in the family, can conquer all. But in this Forrest Gump-ian world of fantastical run-ins with Rosa Parks and Paul Robeson, it is hard to believe that Powers isn't writing for himself. One can just see Richie Powers writing away in a room somewhere, with images of Book Awards dancing in his head. Of course, how can we believe that love will conquer all when important historical figures seem to have more say in the plot than the narrator himself? It is obvious that to Powers, intellect and prestige will really conquer all. This is a man that churns out a new novel every three years, one who's vocabulary spans pi. This is the kind of writer that throws off highbrow jokes such as, "Jonah detested Telemann. The man's greatest claim to fame is turning down a job they then had to give to Bach."
But as much eye rolling Powers' latest book entails, it is still, clearly a winner. Like another award winning book about race relations and music, The Color of Water, The Time of Our Singing manages to educate as well as charm. However, Powers is a dense writer with the drive and vigor of a manic. Wildly ambitious in both its temporal and emotional expansion, The Time of Our Singing is a wildly moving book. Not because it covers so much time and space, or prejudice and love. Not because it hurts to prop its six hundred plus pages open with only one hand. No, sadly enough, Powers is much too ernest and pretentious in his expansive story to fully flesh out his points without the reader getting annoyed with the length, the plot devices, and the lesson that racism is bad. Powers' latest book is successful for writing such an accomplished symphony for the hardest instrument to play, and play well: The heart strings.
Rating:
Summary: brilliant work, but with a hole in the center
Review: Smart and thought-provoking history of the past sixty years from the perspective of an intermarried family, using singing as the motif for their triumphs and tragedies. I found the narrator, Joseph, a bit of a vacuum, however, who drifts along in his brother's shadow, and can't seem to find a life of his own, until he switches to tagging along in his sister's shadow. He's a little like the piano player in Shoot the Piano Player, but unlike that character, it's not clear what made him so shell-shocked. It's a little strange that Joseph, the dark-skinned one, should be so unsure of his own identity, unlike his brilliant older brother, who really should be a fish out of water. Jonah, who is light-skinned but not quite white enough to pass for white, and who sings white, European music, has a much surer sense of direction, and no doubts about charting his own destiny. Because both of the brothers are so outside of the mainstream culture, however, living in the world of serious music, there is unfortunately a bit of a Forrest Gumpish quality to the book, as significant events in history are touched upon by people who do not comprehend them very well. Some of the descriptions of these events are very powerfully evoked, however, such as the 60's urban riots, and especially the killing of Emmett Till. If you don't know that bit of our history, read the book for that alone, or look it up elsewhere.
Rating:
Summary: complex and excellent
Review: The common criticisms of Powers' work - too much intellect at the expense of feeling, a too-heavy reliance on dialectic, theme at the expense of character - have never really resonated with me. With The Time of Our Singing, Powers has again summoned art and science, thought and feeling, to produce a powerful, moving, and thought-provoking novel. I've read a few reviews that criticize the 'musical' passages as boring, but I believe they do capture, very precisely, the sense of being caught up and suspended in a musical work. The conflation/opposition of music and time is a very meaningful metaphor for a life lived (or a long novel) - certainly no musical work, or life, or book could make sense if it happened all at once, or never happened, or always happened. Events stack up in time, like chords, and this book is a veritable symphony.
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