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There is no other contemporary American writer quite like Richard Powers. He is, as Sir Cliff Richard once said of Elvis, "a phenomena". The Time of Our Singing is his eighth novel since the boy-genius published Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance inand, just into his mids, he is a long way from "dropping the Time of Our Singing, as they say. Powers is the best example of an American novelist who straddles CP Snow's "two cultures": a Time of Our Singing musician who began a degree in physics and then switched to literature, who programmed computers while writing his first novel, Powers is at home in the arts and the sciences, and takes the divide between them both as the subject matter and the structural principle of his fiction. His work exemplifies Samuel Johnson's famous description of metaphysical poetry: "heterogeneous ideas yoked by violence together". Take the jaw-dropping intellectual daring of The Gold Bug Variations Here Powers weaves together the four-note motif of Bach's Goldberg Variations, the four nucleotides don't ask described in the structure of DNA, and the tetragrammaton, the four-letter Hebrew word for God. He then folds these themes into three separate narratives which touch only obliquely, linked mainly by the characters' love of the Bach piece. Oh yes, and as an ambient background, there is the ghostly presence of Edgar Allan Poe's tale of the power of decoding and interpretation, "The Gold-Bug". It is this kind of complexity that gets Powers his reputation for writing on the higher frequencies, where only the literary equivalent of a hound dog can hear him. In one sense Powers's novels are like Beethoven symphonies; admirers much prefer the odd-numbered ones. What, then, of this, the eighth novel? It seems at first a very different kind of book from its predecessors. Like Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections, it takes the form of a family saga. With his interest in isolated, atomised individuals and his attempts to Time of Our Singing together seemingly incompatible disciplines, Powers has probably got EM Forster's humanist cry from Howards End, "only connect", hanging over his writing desk. But the phrase has an added poignancy in the new work, for Powers, a writer who knows no fear, takes on what Time of Our Singing Du Bois called America's "problem of the 20th century - the colour line". Powers's story addresses Time of Our Singing tone and shade in the arguments over race in the postwar US. The plot concerns a family essentially brought into being by racism. Inthe Daughters of the American Revolution refused the outstanding black contralto Marian Anderson use of the premier concert venue in Washington DC. As a result, she gave a free open-air concert to 75, people on the steps of the Lincoln memorial. At the concert, Powers's characters David Strom, an exiled German Jewish mathematician and expert on quantum time, and Delia Daley, a talented African American singer, meet. They later marry, an illegal act in half the states of the union inand have three prodigiously talented children: Jonah, who will become a leading classical singer, possessed of a voice that "could make David and Delia make a brave but finally doomed attempt to bring up their children "beyond race". As David, the scientist, puts it: "There is no such thing as race. Race is only real if you freeze time. David and Delia school their children at home, and there are long and sometimes frankly mawkish accounts of familial and musical harmony as they all sing together around the piano. The young mixed-race family, however, is welcome neither in the white nor black districts of 40s New York City. But almost worse Time of Our Singing the racism is the effect of their mixed-race status. As the young Jonah asks: "Mama And Da's some kind of Jewish guy. What exactly Time of Our Singing that make me, Joey and Root? After winning their first important music competition, light-skinned Jonah and Joey are asked: "What exactly are you boys? Powers, in an act of narrative brio, develops an isomorphic relationship between the content and structure of the book by making the most of notions of hybridity or "mixedness". Jonah, too, has his greatest triumph in Time of Our Singing "hybrid" Tippett opera A Child of Our Time, and of course hybridity informs both the politics and the art of Time of Our Singing novel itself. Powers argues for a celebration of multicultural mixing in a book that itself mixes the novel of ideas with the family saga, for it is from David Strom's concept of time as looping back on itself that the book takes its narrative technique. The story is told in short episodes that move Time of Our Singing and forth across five decades, so that we return again and again Time of Our Singing the same events. The novel begins with the competition triumph of Jonah and Joey, but when we return hundreds of pages later to this same Time of Our Singing, it is enriched by the new context in which it is placed. The novel also resists simple linearity by the resonant use of a number of recurring themes. For example, we may guess early on that Time of Our Singing and clock time are being yoked together, but the reader realises with a jolt that notions of frequency and wavelength shape the text, too, because they bring together music, time and, as light waves get their identity from frequency, issues of colour, too. It is a sign of how good Powers can be that this is not his best work. The female characters are by and large a little stereotyped and Time of Our Singing is no Elmore Leonard when it comes to dialogue. But there is barely a page where the reader is not brought up by a startling image or a carefully worked idea. You would have to go back to Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus to find the experience of playing and listening to music so beautifully caught in words. Others may give us more complex characters, but it is rare to find a novel as intellectually and emotionally engaging as this. Face the music. Peter Dempsey. Topics Books Fiction Music books reviews Reuse this content. The Time of Our Singing - Wikipedia

The most accessible, and powerful fiction yet from a major American writer who, against all odds, just keeps getting better. The power of music in its relation to a racially divided family and culture is dramatized with unprecedented Time of Our Singing in this panoramic novel: the eighth from the protean author of, most recently, Plowing the Dark And, as a grace note of sorts, Powers demonstrates that he knows as much about musical technique, theory, and history as he seems to know about almost everything else. The talented Bennett fuels her fiction with secrets—first in her lauded debut, Time of Our Singing Mothersand now in the assured and magnetic story of the Vignes sisters, light-skinned women parked on opposite sides of the color line. The novel opens 14 years later as Desiree, fleeing a violent marriage in D. Marrying a dark man and dragging his blueblack child all over town was one step too far. Time of Our Singing, ensconced in White society, is shedding her fur coat. Jude, so Black that strangers routinely stare, is unrecognizable to her aunt. All this is expertly paced, unfurling before the book is half finished; a reader can guess what is coming. Bennett is deeply engaged in the unknowability of other people and the scourge of colorism. The scene in which Stella adopts her White persona is a tour de force of doubling and confusion. Bennett keeps all these plot threads thrumming and her social commentary crisp. In the second half, Jude spars with her cousin Kennedy, Stella's daughter, a spoiled actress. A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building Time of Our Singing a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old Time of Our Singing followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies A basic statement of the Time of Our Singing of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political Time of Our Singing. Already have an account? Log in. Trouble signing in? Retrieve credentials. Sign Up. Pub Date: Jan. No Comments Yet. More by Richard Powers. New York Times Bestseller. IndieBound Bestseller. Inseparable identical twin sisters ditch home together, and then one decides to vanish. Page Count: Publisher: Riverhead. Show comments. More by Brit Bennett. More About Time of Our Singing Book. Pub Date: Aug. Page Count: Publisher: Harcourt, Brace. Review Posted Online: Nov. Show all comments. More by George Orwell. Please sign up to continue. Almost there! Reader Writer Industry Professional. Send me weekly book recommendations and inside scoop. Keep me logged in. Sign in using your Kirkus account Sign in Keep me logged in. Need Help? Contact us: or email customercare kirkus. Please select an existing bookshelf OR Create a new bookshelf Continue. NPR Choice page

Richard Powers's eighth novel, ''The Time of Our Singing,'' is his first to focus on the world of classical music, but harmonies of one sort or another have always been his subject. From the start of his career, this prodigiously gifted writer has used fiction to suggest that there are hidden resonances among what could easily seem to be wildly disparate elements. In his first novel, ''Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance''a scientist's obsession with a photograph of three German youths, taken in the summer ofbecame the vehicle for an elaborately intertwined series of Time of Our Singing about mechanization, World War I, photography, Sarah Bernhardt, artistic production, competing computer magazines, Henry Ford's flirtation with pacifism and the nature of biography -- a meditation on modernity assembled, it would appear, out of a grab bag. The author's sophomore effort was even more ambitious: ''Prisoner's Dilemma'' pondered various kinds of paradises, to say nothing of hells, by similarly accreting elements from all over: the history of the Time of Our Singing Disney Company, the doings of nuclear physicists in the New Mexico desert and a man who's constructing a model utopia in his attic. And so it went, from novel to dazzling, difficult novel, each a kind of literary installation in which art objects, theoretical musings, plots and subplots, disquisitions on intellectual and literary history, biographies of characters both historical and fictional, histories of countries and corporations, were juxtaposed in a way that led you, if you put in the effort, to an awareness Time of Our Singing some larger underlying theme. In ''Plowing the Dark''you were asked to consider the nature of reality: a man held hostage in Beirut attempts, in his solitary confinement, to reconstruct mentally his lost cultural world he tries to remember ''Great Expectations'' and Robert Frost while, far away, the computer-whiz employees of a vast American corporation are given the task of ''modeling,'' in a blank virtual environment called the Cavern, everything from weather systems to famous paintings. In ''The Gold Bug Variations''Powers's densest, most difficult and most ambitious work until now, a librarian and an art-history Ph. The solution -- en route to which you encounter Paul Robeson, Vermeer, Pascal and medieval unicorn tapestries -- involves a mind-bending and ultimately Time of Our Singing moving suggestion, typical of Powers, that Bach's use of four notes in the Goldberg Time of Our Singing, the four nucleotides in DNA and the tetragrammaton, the four letters in the Hebrew name of God, are all connected in a way that sheds hopeful light on our understanding of what it means to be human. The range to say nothing of the amount of material that Powers likes to load into his novels can seem overwhelming, but certain recurrent themes and preoccupations structure pretty much all of the work. Chief among these is the relationship between science and art, the objective ''facts'' of existence and the subjective ways we interpret them. Powers knows whereof he speaks: for a while he made a living writing computer code, after getting an M. From that first novel on it opens with a brilliant Time of Our Singing piece about a Diego Rivera mural depicting an assembly lineart and technology have shadowed each other. Both, as Powers reminds us in ''The Time of Our Singing,'' arose at the same moment in human history; both, he insists, are essential and complementary means of grappling with the outside world, and with ourselves. In his best-known Time of Our Singing, ''Galatea 2. Powers's interest in the very latest expressions of technological culture, his self-conscious awareness of contemporary theoretical issues Walter Benjamin pops up in ''Three Farmers on Their Way to Time of Our Singing Dance''; game theory gives ''Prisoner's Dilemma'' its title and his penchant for contriving ingenious climactic connections between his scientific and ''artistic'' subplots make it tempting to see him as one of a group of youngish writers -- the literary Time of Our Singing of Don DeLillo, you could call them -- whose work is marked by a cool, clever, deeply ironic, postmodern hyper-self-consciousness: David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, Dave Eggers. But strip the talking feces away from Franzen's ''Corrections,'' or the charming, rather Jimmy Stewartesque stuttering and apologetic footnotes from ''A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius,'' and you don't really lose anything vital; underneath the pomo swags and ribbons, these are deeply conventional narratives. With Powers, on the other hand, you can't really separate out any one element -- the theories, the paintings, the photos, the capsule biographies of industrialists and actresses -- because what the novels are about, what they demonstrate, is the hitherto hidden connections among all those things. However idiosyncratic his technique, the novelists whom Powers really resembles are the 19th-century behemoths, like Balzac or Zola or Tolstoy, who also wanted to show you how everything in society is really intertwined. He wants to make you hear, in other words, the concord that both underlies and explains the confusing jangle of modern life. As its title suggests, ''The Time of Our Singing,'' Powers's most sprawling work to date, is concerned with harmonies of the literal kind: the book traces the lives of a family of music prodigies over the course of the 20th century. But the title is even more literal than you might think, because time itself or, rather, Time is another of the book's subjects. In a gesture familiar by now Time of Our Singing his earlier work, Powers combines the artistic and the scientific, classical music and physics, song and Einsteinian Time of Our Singing. Here again, Powers wants the sounding of two separate narrative strings to throw off an Time of Our Singing, a larger thematic statement. That Delia is a young black woman, and the concert where she meets her future husband is the one that Marian Time of Our Singing gave on the Washington Mall when the D. Delia and David marry, to the mild consternation of her well-heeled Philadelphia family his has disappeared into the Holocaustand have three children, who, at least symbolically, run the gamut from white to gray to black. Jonah, the pale-skinned eldest, is endowed with a pure tenor voice as colorless as he wishes he were; as the novel follows the arc of his career, he learns that the exalted world of high art is not as colorblind as he might wish. After a triumphant New York recital debut, he's hailed by The Times as ''one of the finest Negro recitalists this country has ever produced''; when the Met finally offers him a meaningful job, it's as the nameless ''Negro'' in a contemporary opera. The youngest and darkest child, Ruth, born after Delia's violent break with her parents -- her father, a physician, has quarreled with her husband over whether the use of the atomic bomb at Hiroshima was, at bottom, a racist act -- grows up estranged from Time of Our Singing family, ultimately abandoning their celebration of ''white'' music for membership in the Black Panthers. The book's narrator is the middle child, Joseph, the peacemaker in the family, a pianist Time of Our Singing conflicted sibling, and racial, allegiances are represented, with a symbolic ingenuity typical of Powers, by a career crisis: he eventually abandons his classical training he is his brother's faithful accompanistfirst for a stint as a lounge pianist playing Muzaked jazz, and then for a job as a music teacher, composing his own kind of jazz. Just as freighted with meaning is the way Jonah's musical interests keep moving back in time, from 20th-century music to 19th-century opera to, finally, early music: ''Our parents had tried to raise us beyond race. Jonah decided to sing his way back before it. In keeping with the novel's interest in Einsteinian temporality, the narrative moves around in time, weaving between past and present, entwining the story of Jonah's rise to stardom with that of his parents' courtship and early married life, both strands punctuated by set pieces describing crucial aspects of the higher physics, rapturous descriptions of performances that Jonah gives a signature piece is, significantly, Dowland's ''Time Stands Still'' and key moments in the nation's racist history: Marian Anderson's humiliation by the D. There is a great deal to admire in the grand symphonic music that Powers makes of these individual notes. As his vast and complex narrative unfolds, the innumerable humiliations to which the Stroms of all shades are subjected are poignantly evoked; the worst are the most quotidian. At the fancy private conservatory to which Delia sends her two sons, she's mistaken for the family maid by their classmates. The counterpoint between music, physics and history forces you to see even the most innocuous-seeming cultural artifact as somehow tainted. There are, indeed, hints throughout the book that in a world in which even art is corrupted at every Time of Our Singing by the lowest human impulses that Delia's application for admission to the Curtis Institute will be rejected is a foregone conclusionscience is where we must look for our solace. Some of the novel's most startling moments -- scenes repeated almost verbatim at surprising junctures: Marian Anderson looking through a tunnel in time to her own future, Joseph's recurrent sightings of a beautiful, elusive woman who turns out to be his own mother in her youth -- fulfill relativity's implicit promise of time travel. The ultimate escape into the future, in other words, for those stuck in an unbearable present: the ultimate rescue vehicle as David Strom sees it for those who have perished in the past. And yet you can't help thinking, as you make your sometimes laborious way through the novel it is far too long -- or, to quote the famous critique of that ultimate musician, Time of Our Singing, filled with ''too many notes''that Time of Our Singing something essentially unresolved beneath the fascinating contrapuntal writing. Part of the problem is Powers himself. His weakness as a writer is the weakness of all conceptual artists: you may admire his elaborate installations, but you sometimes find yourself missing the simple pleasures of good old-fashioned painting. Beautiful brushwork, for one: Powers has never been a writer of lovely sentences, and there's something perfunctory about the way he sometimes remembers to attempt background verisimilitude: ''That's Regina Resnik over there. Isn't she lovely? I'm so glad she's gone over to mezzo. With the possible exception of David and of Delia's imposing physician father, you never really believe in this family. You accept that what happens to them, or people like them, is real; but you don't really feel it. Like the characters, certain other elements, more of them than usual for a Powers novel, strike you as constructed rather than organic. The last third of the novel feels exhausted; as it lumbers through history from Hiroshima to the Million Man March, you feel that Powers is dutifully ticking items off a Time of Our Singing list of race-related episodes in American history. But in the end, the real problem may lie in Powers's subject. For all the daring of his idiosyncratic approach to writing about race, it's not clear just what it is about race in America that music, and physics, can finally reveal -- except that the problem is intractable. There is some ugliness that even the most dazzling aesthetic strategies can't transform. Still, if it seems too artificial, too notional, to talk about color in terms of music -- Time of Our Singing and light, music and color, are, in the end, couples as strange as the bird and the fish, the unlikely Time of Our Singing pairing to which David will again and again compare his own improbable, and finally impossible, marriage -- a climactic revelation, posted to the future from the past, reminds you that both light and sound are composed of waves. It's an insight that, like much else in this remarkable book, doesn't solve a great deal in real life, but it's quite beautiful to think about, which is enough for art. Powers's blending of unlikely tones in order to probe the problems of a society that continues to insist, all grays to the contrary, on seeing everything in terms of black and white is, more often than not, a fascinating, stimulating and moving artistic imagining of a harmony that continues to elude us in life. Books A Dance to the Music of Time. Home Page World U.