Product Description

Jonah, Joseph and Ruth are the children of mixed-race parents determined to protect them from the grinding effects of race. Hothouse children, they are all musically talented, but they cannot be protected from the world for long. Jonah becomes a successful young tenor, but the world of opera can only accept him as a 'brilliant Negro singer'; Joseph, our narrator, becomes a pianist and devotes his talents to the service of his brother's; Ruth turns her back on classical music ('white music') and disappears, on the run with her black husband under suspicion of being a Black Panther.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #22214 in Books
• Published on: 2004-02-05
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 640 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Richard Powers' novel The Time of Our Singing has had the kind of pre-publishing hype that few literary novels enjoy. "One of the greatest American novels ever written" is the sort of praise that has been laid at the feet of this one, but this enthusiasm for the work of Richard Powers is nothing new. In books such as Plowing the Dark, Powers has shown himself capable of a remarkable balancing act: his books have had a strong scientific underpinning, carefully balanced with allusions to classical art and couched in narratives that have the sweep of the great nineteenth-century novelists. Here, the complex plot manages to take in the demands of artistic talent, familial conflict and a nation divided by racism.

The central character is Jonah Strom, a highly talented tenor of mixed-race born to Jewish physicist David Strom (who has fled Germany) and Delia Dailey, a middle-class black opera singer. The relationship of Jonah's parents began at the famous recital given by the great black soprano Marion Anderson when she was rejected by the classical music establishment. David and Delia are very different people, but their love of music becomes central to the lives of their sons; the singer Jonah and his younger brother Joseph, who becomes a pianist and accompanies his brother. While Jonah struggles for the acceptance of the white establishment, his rebellious younger sister Ruth takes a different path and confronts the issues of race in her life by marrying a Black Panther and taking on her enemies. It is left to Joseph to find an accommodation somewhere between these two extremes.

While all the younger characters here are drawn with the kind of lucid detail that is Powers’ particular speciality, the real skill of the narrative lies in the parents David and Delia. The former is, in fact, the most richly drawn character, with his humanity and intellect triumphantly brought to life. The discursive narrative needs careful attention from the reader, and this is not a book for those seeking undemanding reading. But the rewards here are many: this is a biting and exuberant novel that isn't afraid to tackle many uncomfortable issues. --Barry Forshaw

Review
This is a book to take your breath away, so powerful that its ideas and imagination fire the reader's mind. Powers has taken a mixed-race couple, a black woman and a German Jewish immigrant, to tell the story of race in America. The man is a physicist obsessed with the definition of time and the woman is a singer. Music and time, the twin themes of the novel, allow him to return again and again to a subject or a scene, to take a jump into the past or the future. The end meets the beginning with a small black boy lost in the crowd near the statue of Abraham Lincoln during Marian Anderson's concert in 1939 and, in the closing pages, the same small boy disappears into the millions attending a meeting led by Farrakhan. In between there is the obscene illegality of mixed marriages, the savage cruelty and inequality leading to the civil rights movement, the rise of black power and the subsequent imprisonment of the Panthers and, described with shattering immediacy, there are the bloody race riots. David and Delia believe that 'the bird and the fish can marry' but this act of faith leaves their children labelled 'mulatto' or 'mule', the butt of discrimination and gibes from black and white. One son embraces classical music and defends his right to plunder what is beautiful in the European heritage while another tries to understand each and every kind of music so that all people might sing. 'Time', argues Powers, 'doesn't flow but is. In such a world, all the things that we ever will be or were, we are. In such a world who we are must be all things.' No concessions are made to the reader who must wrestle with long explanations of quantum physics and subtle descriptions of harmony and dissonance. The triumph of this writing is that the novel's traditional form is woven so tightly with the philosophical ideas that every page is a welcome discovery and a joy. (Kirkus UK)

Booker-shortlisted author Jim Crace
'Richard Powers is a kind of genius, but it is the 'kind of' that makes him so readable. Straight geniuses usually make bad novelists.'