Richard Powers: The Time
of Our Singing
 You
probably didn't log onto an audio website expecting to read a book review, but I'd like to
think this isn't a run-of-the-mill audio website -- and The Time of Our Singing
certainly isn't a run-of-the-mill book.
It's a big book (640 pages) and it grapples with huge
ideas: music, time, race, identity, memory, and destiny.
Even so, you're still probably wondering why I'd review it
here. Perhaps the easiest thing to do is simply quote the book's opening passage:
December 1961
In some empty hall, my brother is still singing. His
voice hasn't dampened yet. Not altogether. The rooms where he sang still hold an
impression, their walls dimpled with his sound, awaiting some future phonograph capable of
replaying them.
You see? The book not only deals with familiar (to us
audiophiles, at least) concepts, it actually starts out with them.
But far more than the simple question of audio
fidelity, the book deals with the issue of artistic fidelity and the even trickier
question of who has a right to grasp an artform and make it his or her own.
The Time of Our Singing is the story of a family,
the Stroms, as they live through 60 years of the twentieth century. Delia, a young
African-American classically trained soprano, and Joseph, a German-Jewish refugee
physicist, meet at Marian Anderson's 1939 recital at the Lincoln Memorial. They marry and
have three children -- Jonah, Joseph, and Ruth. The elder Stroms seek to raise their
children "beyond race" and all three spend their lives seeking a sense of
identity denied them by their parents' refusal to accept a simple reductionist view.
Jonah and Joseph grow up to have careers in classical music
-- deep in the "white" world of high culture. Ruth, the darkest of the three,
seeks her identity in the black-power movement, joining the Black Panthers and starting an
inner-city school that fosters empowerment.
The bird and the fish can fall in love. But where they
gonna build a nest?
This is the question we must all answer for ourselves.
Music (Delia's legacy and the elder Joseph's passion) leaps
off the page. The book is structured like a classical composition. It lays out themes,
alternates them with other sections of equal power, and then recapitulates the earlier
themes periodically.
The Marian Anderson concert is revisited several times,
told from a different point of view each go-round. Powers even weaves in variations on it
-- first the 1963 March on Washington, which also took place on the Mall, as well as the
1995 Million Man March (which also serves as an emotionally revelatory coda for the book).
Other themes are stated and revisited, and periodically
there are lyrical interludes alluding to great works of classical music. And -- music
being the art of tones in time -- time figures prominently in the narrative. The elder
Joseph's field is time, and he believes that past, present, and future are illusions --
that all of time takes place in an infinite now in which all events happen
simultaneously.
On the other hand, that's all relative -- any two people
can inhabit different time streams based on velocity and reciprocity.
The book plays with that temporal elasticity. It leaps
forward and back in time. It lingers over some scenes and accelerates others. And this
isn't just a narrative device; it is woven throughout the narrative. Two paragraphs
beneath the opening quoted above, Joey Strom describes his brother's recital:
One moment, the Erl-King is hunched on my brother's
shoulder, whispering a blessed death. In the next, a trapdoor opens up in 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:
Time stands still with gazing on her face,
Stand still and gaze for minutes, hours, and years to her give place.
All other things shall change, but she remains the same,
Till heavens have changed their course and time hath lost his name.
Obviously, Powers is capable of writing beautifully -- what
I hadn't realized was the passion with which he could do so. In The Time of Our Singing,
Powers manages to make us care about art, ideas, and most importantly -- and this is
really what makes the novel so profound -- people.
...Wes Phillips
wes@onhifi.com
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