Time of Our Singing FROM THE PUBLISHER
On Easter Day, 1939, at Marian Anderson's epochal concert on the Washington Mall, David Strom, a German Jewish emigre scientist, meets Delia Daley, a young Philadelphia Negro studying to be a concert singer. Their mutual love of music draws them together, and - against all odds, advice, and better judgment - they marry. They vow to raise their offspring beyond time, beyond race, beyond belonging, steeped in song. But their three children, the unwitting subjects of this experiment, must survive America's brutal here and now.
Jonah, Joseph and Ruth grow up during the early Civil Rights era, come of age in the riot-torn 1960s, and live out their adulthoods through the racially retrenched late century. Jonah, the eldest, "whose voice could make heads of state repent," pursues a life devoted to his parents' beloved classical music. Ruth, the youngest, chooses a path of militant activism and repudiates the white culture her brother represents. Joseph, the middle child and the narrator of this far-ranging, multigenerational tale, struggles to remain loyal to both siblings. As a polarized America threatens to tear the family apart, only their deep, shared love of song stands any hope of preserving them.
SYNOPSIS
On Easter Day, 1939, at Marian Anderson's epochal concert on the Washington Mall, David Strom, a German Jewish ﾽmigrﾽ scientist, meets Delia Daley, a young Philadelphia Negro studying to be a concert singer. Against all odds, they marry, vowing to raise their offspring beyond time, beyond race, beyond belonging, steeped in song.
FROM THE CRITICS
Sven Birkerts - Esquire
Powers is a genuine artist, a thinker of rare synthetic gifts, maybe the only writer working . . .
Sven Birkerts - Esquire
Powers is a genuine artist, a thinker of rare synthetic gifts, maybe the only writer working . . .
Book Magazine - Tom LeClair
Richard Powers is known for exploring complicated scientific ideas, such as chaos theory, in his fiction and for employing multiple narrative forms. The author's eighth novel takes a different kind of thematic risk. Like Philip Roth's The Human Stain, The Time of Our Singing is a book by a white writer that features African-American characters as its protagonists. The gamble has paid off: This is Powers' most emotionally engaging, stylistically accessible and culturally aware novel, a family album stuffed with memories and clippings that are not always chronologically arranged. This multigenerational story of a biracial family begins with the 1940 marriage of Delia Daley, an African-American amateur singer from Philadelphia, and David Strom, a Jewish-German music-loving physicist teaching at Columbia University. Interracial marriage, Powers reminds us, was still against the law in many American states at midcentury. Delia and David find some shelter in New York City and have three children, all musical prodigies. The almost white Jonah and the very light Joseph go to a private music school in Boston, leaving Ruth, the darkest of the siblings, to witness her mother's death by fire when Ruth is ten and the boys fourteen and thirteen. After Delia's death, the family splinters: David retreats into his quantum physics; the boys become professional musicians and live on the road; Ruth is left largely alone to discover the meaning of her race. Unlike Ruth, who eventually joins the Black Panther Party, the male Stroms mostly try to avoid the subject of race. Jonah attempts to transcend color by moving to Europe and singing medieval music, written before slavery came to America. Joseph, his faithful brother and pianist, is split between the values and cultural interests of his light-skinned brother and his dark-skinned sister. Ruth, meanwhile, marries a fellow Panther, with whom she has two sons. When Jonah is around, the conflicted Joseph plays classical European music; for patrons of an Atlantic City club, he plays the music from his African-American heritage that would most please Ruth. In The Time of Our Singing, Powers dramatizes with graceful authority the complexities of an interracial family in the 1950s and the consequences for the family in the 1990s. Delia's arguments with her physician father over her Jewish husband are rich with psychological nuance and cross-cultural subtlety. Ruth's arguments with her teenage son, Kwame, over his future in "gangsta" Oakland provocatively recast Delia's issues of racial identity and personal freedom as Powers stretches the scope of his novel across five tumultuous decades in which the Strom family learns to be functional. Powers' reputation as a novelistic prodigy stems partly from his talent for structural ingenuity. His novel The Gold Bug Variations, for example, conformed to the pattern of Bach's Goldberg Variations. The Time of Our Singing is more relaxed in its composition, more like jazz. Powers elicits curiosity about and affection for the Strom children and occasionally substitutes their development for plot. For readers who didn't live through the civil rights movement of the 1960s, Powers provides helpful background. And he brings his characters to three vividly rendered mass gatherings in Washington: a 1939 Marian Anderson concert, where Delia and David meet; Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1963 "I Have a Dream" speech, which Ruth and David attend; and the 1995 Million Man March, which Joseph and Ruth's sons attend. The Time of Our Singing continues Powers' recent turn toward political subjects. His 1998 novel Gain critiqued capitalist enterprise, and 2000's Plowing the Dark was about the military's use during the Gulf War of virtual reality research for smart bombing. While this new novel may appear to be a politically correct attack on white culture—the white European scientist David and his son, the pale Eurocentric artist Jonah, do the most damage to their kin by shirking family responsibilities—the black characters, including Delia's father, the proud patriarch Dr. Daley, and the activist Ruth also share blame for their family's division. In the final line of the classic novel Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison's black narrator appears to address white readers: "who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you." Powers seems to be replying to and updating Ellison's words in a scene in the latter part of the novel that finds Ruth contemplating a question, ostensibly about music, posed by her son: "Not beyond color; into it," she thinks. "Not or; and. And new ands all the time. Continuous new frequencies." The Time of Our Singing is not about black or white voices. With its color spectrum of characters, the novel speaks for a new culture of people who continuously break down these racial binaries. Coupled with Powers' accessible prose, their story is likely to speak to us all.
Publishers Weekly
Powers (Plowing the Dark, etc.) has generated considerable excitement as a novelist of ideas, but as a creator of characters, he is on shakier ground. Here he confronts his weaknesses head-on, crafting a hefty family saga that attempts to probe generational conflicts, sibling rivalries and racial identity. The book follows the mixed-race Strom family through much of the 20th century, from 1939 when German-Jewish physicist David Strom meets Delia Daley, a black, classically trained singer from Philadelphia through the 1990s. The couple marries and has three children: eldest son Jonah, a charismatic, egotistical singing prodigy; Joseph, his self-sacrificing accompanist; and Ruth, the rebel of the family, who becomes a militant black activist. There are two separate strands to the story: one is a third-person chronicle of David and Delia's relationship through the 1940s; the other, narrated by Joseph, is about the brothers' education in the nearly all-white world of classical music and their experience of the civil rights movement as the rest of the country grudgingly catches up to the Stroms' radical experiment. Powers's premise is intriguing, and the plot's architecture is impressive, informed by the notion, from physics, of space-time wrinkles and time curves. Missing, however, are the pulse-quickening vintage-Powers moments in which his discussions of technology and science open up profound existential quandaries. Most of the book is taken up with a prolonged, overdetermined and off-key examination of family relationships and identity struggles. Narrator Joseph is supposed to be eclipsed by his brother, but Powers overshoots the mark: for half the book, Joseph is little more than a pair of eyes and ears. Powers's depiction of how public events filter into individual consciousness can also be surprisingly unimaginative; Joseph periodically runs down a list of current events, using stale, iconic imagery ("our hatless boy president plays touch football on the White House lawn"). Powers deserves credit for taking a risk, but his own experiment reveals his startling tone deafness to the subtle inflections of human experience. (Jan. 22, 2003) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
Library Journal
Delia Daley met David Strom on Easter Sunday in Washington, DC, in 1939 at a concert by Marion Anderson held outside the Lincoln Memorial after the DAR refused to let her perform indoors. And so the talented black woman from Philadelphia and the German Jewish refugee physicist and teacher from Columbia University fall in love and create a universe that parallels the history of time, music, and civil rights. Powers (Plowing the Dark) moves between present and past, with sections of the novel, not really chapters, alternating between the third person and a first-person account narrated by the Stroms' middle child and younger son, Joseph. While Delia is refused a prestigious musical education because of her race, Einstein himself suggests that the couple's elder son, Jonah, take singing lessons to further his obvious talent. Meanwhile, daughter Ruth questions her mixed heritage, and her actions mirror the growth of black militancy throughout the country as civil rights takes hold. The title of this book pervades each page, with the structure of time and the discipline of singing woven throughout. The language is dense, often difficult; this reviewer, who takes singing lessons, found the descriptions of technique mesmerizing but elusive. Did I mention physics? Powers's work is undoubtedly complex, but his stories are compelling, lyrical, and timeless. Readers who invest the time in this lengthy novel will be rewarded. Recommended for all literary fiction collections. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 9/15/02.]-Bette-Lee Fox, "Library Journal" Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
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