Richard Powers:The time of our singing

By MARGIE THOMSON

Powers is one of those polymathic novelists who at once excites and threatens to overwhelm readers with his vast scope (in this case, nothing less than the vicissitudes of time, coupled with a millennium of music and a century of racial storm in America) and postmodern cultural consciousness.

The key to Powers' writing is to be found in his life. He was born in 1957 in Chicago and, while still a boy, discovered music. He trained in the cello and vocal music but also plays guitar, clarinet and saxophone.

In Understanding Richard Powers, American literature professor Joseph Dewey writes of Powers' "restless curiosity". I suppose that's one way of describing his educational path which meandered through paleontology, oceanography and archaeology before choosing physics at the University of Illinois.

Realising that the sciences encouraged too much specialisation for his liking, he switched to literature, convinced that it was "the perfect place for someone who wanted the aerial view", and completed an MA before leaving university to embark on his own eclectic programme of reading: history, sociology, political science, aesthetics and hard science theory, as well as a wide range of novels and poetry, "random pleasures, all over the map", as he has put it.

He wrote his first novel in the early 1980s and several more since then and is considered one of the most important writers of his generation. It is that "aerial view", that sense of the connectedness of all things, that is his dominant concern in his life and writing. The Time of Our Singing embodies this very thing.

The book is weighty with discussions of the movement of time, music and racial identity, themes woven inextricably into the forceful, looping, soaring path of his narrative.

He has chosen as his narrator the concert pianist Joseph Strom, second of three children of a controversial marriage, in 1939, between a black American woman Delia Daley, and a German-Jewish immigrant David Strom. Their love match was born of their mutual love for music, and the couple are determined to protect their children from the effects of race.

"We're not calling them anything ... We're trying to raise them beyond race," Delia tells her sceptical mother.

"The choice don't belong to you. It don't even belong to them. Everybody else is going to make it for them," her mother rebuts, before severing contact.

"The bird and the fish can fall in love, but where will they build their nest?" is the recurring, wistful motif, engendering different answers at different points in the book. In the middle of the 20th century in America, however, there was no easy answer to such a question, and we see many examples of the revenge wreaked on those who even tried to make it across the barbed-wire fence that several centuries of brutality had erected between black and white Americans.

Delia, a trained singer, and David, a physicist obsessed with the movement of time, decide to homeschool their children and nurture their prodigious musical talents. It is Einstein who, when visiting the family for one of their famous musical evenings, insists that Jonah's voice - of a quality that comes only once a century - is so special he needs to move outside the family for his training.

So Jonah is sent to boarding school - thrust into difference - and insists on taking Joseph with him as his accompanist - a kind of lifelong sidekick and support, even though Joseph considers himself "merely adequate" compared to his brother's brilliance.

Just as Jonah's ambition and self-obsession seem a brutal force at odds with the beauty of his voice, Joseph's passivity and selflessness will drive you crazy at times, although his gentle honesty is very endearing.

Their career advances in fits and starts: soaring giddily, stumbling with the blows of racial putdowns, encapsulating the transcendental powers of music and the essential loneliness and isolation of those who live on the outside of the mainstream.

At the same time as they advance in the "white culture" world of classical music, America burns as race riots break out in cities across the nation and countless people die. The national, historical tragedy plays out in the Strom household, as Joseph and Jonah's sister Ruth grows up angry and eventually rejects her white father in favour of the Black Panthers. Race hatred is "bigger than family. Something that trumps even blood."

Powers' voice rings through the pages. His characters are symbolic creations, in the story for what they can teach us about the culture and the universe rather than as character explorations in their own right. Yet we feel their raw experiences as human beings - actually feel it in the stomach, such is the involving power of his writing.

The book is too long. Its more than 600 pages will put many people off, and there are places where you wish the long conversations could have been trimmed back. But his vision is compelling, his writing inspirational and, once started, it is not to be abandoned.

A master of the aphorism, they collect on his pages like spilled pepper. Here is a tiny sampling: "Race is only real if you freeze time"; "The universe is an orchestra"; "Written music is an index of time"; and "You know what time is? Time is just one damn thing after another."


William Heinemann / $34.95