by Richard Powers
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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.
Amazon.com Review
In some respects, Richard Powers's The Time of Our Singing is just a big, absorbing drama about an American family, with the typical ingredients of an immigrant parent and some social obstacles--in this case, a biracial marriage in the Civil Rights era--to be overcome by the talented children. But Powers's lyrical gifts lift this material far above its familiar subject matter. His descriptions of music alone will transport the reader. The Strom family were raised with this common language: "Our parents' Crazed Quotations game played on the notion that every moment's tune had all history's music box for its counterpoint. On any evening in Hamilton Heights, we could jump from organum to atonality without any hint of all the centuries that had died fiery deaths between them." The central figure of this novel is the dazzling Jonah, who makes a life from singing, and who may be the only person around him who regards his racial heritage as irrelevant to his ambitions. Powers's is such a fertile writer, however, that he can't stay with any single story, but plunges into pages and pages of family and social histories. The result is a rambling, resonant, fearless novel that pulls the reader along in its wake. --Regina Marler
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Average Customer Review:
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
 Time outlives everything, 2007-09-01
This is an amazing novel byRichard Powers. an ambitious generational tale of an American family with a mixed heritage of African-American and German Jew, and covers the travails, triumphs and tragedies of this family. There are three children, one with a beautiful singing voice who opts for a classical music career, a daughter who becomes involved with the civil rights struggle,and a second brother who, though gifted as well, buries his ambition to bridge the gap between his siblings. Not a perfect novel--sometimes Powers' superb style turns into a list of historical events as a means to convey the sweep of time-- but the central issues of race, identity, culture are handled well within the story. The writing is generous and frequently beautiful, especially at the moments when the description turns to the music. Powers, as well as any one, describes how notes played the right way can make one believe in heaven and the angels who live there.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
 An ambitious project., 2007-05-07
It's a Richard Powers book concerning two brothers, both classical musicians, of different temperment and talent, who are born in the forties. Their parents are a black Philadelphia aristocratic soprano woman and a Jewish physicist man who emigrated from Germany on the eve of World War II.
The couple homeschools their children and raises them on classical music and above race. As you can imagine, once the boys leave school, armed with music alone, the two navigate their life with a deep sense of alienation and social irresponsibility that comes with being passable black classical musicians in the nineteen fifties, sequestered in their practice room, while they watch a bloody revolution happening outside of their conservatory walls and on the streets of America.
The book has an enormous and tumultuous span, from the 20s until the 90s, and should be considered an epic. I recommend it, but it's a qualified recommend. Powers is a bit relentless in his narrative, if you don't know anything about music, physics, or American history, he doesn't take time to catch you up. It didn't bother me, but that's because I happen to know music, physics, and American History. Had the story been about painting, chemistry, and Canadian History, I would have been looking up a lot on wikipedia.
Some of the relationships are truly touching, and at its best, the book is like the Adventures of Kavalier and Clay meets the Grapes of Wrath, which is a recipe for the Great American Novel, at its worst, Powers overwrites like Rushdie. It's a thoughtful, fantastic story of small people who never wanted to do anything big, but historical circumstance and love precluded them from living small.
There is a huge story he tries to tell. The structure necessary to contain the scope and the breadth of this story is awesome. Bravo. It wasn't an unqualified success, but I am definitely going to run out and read "The Prisoner's Dilemma."
Showing the impact of race in America on Black men is deeply difficult, but Powers succeeds in provocative ways.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
Best read of the year to date, 2007-05-02
This is the first novel I have read by Richard Powers, and it knocked my socks off. A big book grappling with big issues: race, art, humanity's capacity to annihilate itself. What I admired most was that Powers' approach doesn't come to hard conclusions, but rather acknowledges that these issues are complex, that human beings respond to situations in myriad ways--nothing is preordained and life is finally mysterious, no matter what path you take. Besides inspiring a lot of rather philosophical musing about life, the novel is also a damned good read--I laughed, I cried, and when the book was done, I kept dreaming about these characters.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
A rare treat, 2007-01-05
The most obvious attraction of this book is its language: rich and economical, often just suggestive enough to seed your imagination, something expected perhaps in a poem, but remarkable in a novel of this size.
The white man and the black woman chance upon meeting in each other a kindred soul that can equally share their singular love for music. Their love at first sound was long time in the making: they fell in love with the same music long before they met. At their catalytic encounter, they hit on new notes and surprise themselves with thinking out of the tribe. Together they discover the joy of improvisation and from that day on will never look back at scripted performance alone. This magic of the triple birth - two voices and the harmony they formed - inspires them to build a family around it.
Building up this tradition with their children, they share in daily singing sessions: creating harmony while actively helping each family member, including the youngest ones, develop their own voice. The two older brothers are defined by these early sessions, their lives governed by music. One could argue that the youngest Ruth is defined by these sessions as well, although in a different way: by the time they abruptly ended with her mother's death, Ruth needed these sessions, and her family, the most. She spent her life looking for the cause of Delia's death and fighting it. She rejected the music that, she was convinced, ultimately killed her mother, and she defined herself in opposition to the belief that brought her parents together. This book is as much about family as it is about music and race.
The intertwining stories of past and present form the DNA of the book. Their alternating chapter pattern with occasional cliff hangers at the end make up a lively and engaging structure.
Powers's special signature is his personal and poetic rendition of the art and science that he mixes in with the main characters of his books. In "Gold Bug Variations", it was molecular biology and Bach. In "Prisoner's Dilemma", it was game theory and pathology. In "The Time of Our Singing", it is music and theory of relativity. Here, for physics he chooses the most difficult delivery: in the voice of the scientist at the top of the field, explaining his work to his children. As for the music, it is not simply the inspiration bringing out the best in many characters of the book, or only the force connecting parents with children and children with each other. More importantly, it clearly inspires Powers and elevates the narrative to the state of grace.
For all the other merits of the book, for its fresh look at race in America, for its colorful characters and unexpected situations, I would most readily pick it up again for its language, for the beautifully crafted prose.
1 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
 Many Old Ideas, 2006-12-17
I really like Powers - as a scientist I appreciate his ability to write intelligently about a world that includes maths and physics - and I have read many of his books. I'm unsure what order they were published in, so it may be that what follows would apply to another book if you are reading in chronological order, but this book contained many ideas (motifs? ticks?) from the work I was already familiar with.
In particular, there's a long (this is not a short book) rehash of "relationship failing due to sense of indebtedness". I assume this is taken from the author's own life (I recall something similar in (what I assume was) the semi-autobiographical Galatea 2.2). Richard Powers, if you're reading this: please, get over it. I am tired of paying to be your therapist. OK?
The historical context was fascinating - I learnt a huge amount - but both Goldberg and Galatea are better books. At least, if you read them before this one.
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