The Time of Our Singing: A Novel Review

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The Time of Our Singing: A Novel Review...that is heartbreaking in its beauty and its tragedy. And its hope.

I thought for a long time regarding how best to describe this book in one sentence. In this, I felt as if I had been put in the predicament experienced by a New York Times book reviewer who, two decades ago, in describing a favorite work of literature, wrote "...I find myself nervous, to a degree I don't recall in my past as a reviewer, about failing the work, inadequately describing its brilliance." And, with apologies to another author whose title words I paraphrase above, this is how I choose to describe this powerful new novel.

The overarching theme of the story is race, and what it is like to be black in America (even if that "blackness" is barely apparent and issues of class and culture are largely absent). It is the story of three siblings - two brothers of nearly the same age and a younger sister - flung apart repeatedly by the centripetal force of race and its effect on family and career in the latter half of the 20th century, only to be brought back together time and again by the pressure of events, both familial and racial. Powers uses the subthemes of classical music and contemporary physics to compelling effect in weaving together both the narrative of the siblings (and their family) and the greater story of "being black in America." In the process, he cuts across time, flashing backwards and forwards in the narrative while telling both the story of the siblings and the history of race relations from their parents' generation to the near-present. The latter is dealt with in a series of brilliant set pieces covering every race-relations event of significance over this period, from Marian Anderson's Lincoln Memorial concert of 1939, in defiance of the D.A.R., to the Million Man March more than half-century later; in the process, the story's protagonists appear, "Zelig-like," at the periphery of these events.

Told more "linearly" than Powers's style of cutting back and forth in time, the story is about an interracial couple (he, a German Jewish emigre physicist recently escaped from Nazi Germany, she, a talented black singer without opportunity for a professional career due to color) who choose to rear these siblings "colorless" and home-schooled in their formative years (including intensive attention to music and singing). The choice - largely that of the father - can be read as a well-intentioned but ultimately failing effort to increase racial "entropy," a term from physics that Powers doesn't use explicitely but nonetheless seems to suggest.

The subtheme of music propels the narrative forward. Jonah - the older son - is destined for great things as a singer; he has a voice of such beauty and purity that one like it comes along, at best, once per generation. Joseph - the younger son (by a year), and the story's narrator - is not the talent that Jonah is, but he is the main support backbone - an "enabler" - for Jonah, as well as his accompanist, over much of the tale. Ruth - the sister, younger by a few years - might well have been the greatest of the three in terms of talent, but an early tragic event takes her in an entirely different direction.

Powers uses the physics subtheme to entirely different effect. The nature of time (in the context of the role it plays in Einstein's Theory of Relativity) is brought to into question on the discontinuities in the narrative and the near-repetition of specific events, as if time has the ability to fold back on itself, even repeat itself from an "event standpoint." In one of the better set pieces in the book, Powers places the father and the two boys in The Cloisters (at the northern tip of Manhattan) when they are quite young. This is their first experience at hearing medieval music, and the experience will eventually fold back on itself - decades later - in a way that I found astonishing yet logical.

It needs to be said, too, that that this is not just the story of Jonah, Joseph and Ruth. Or simply the story of "being black in America." As Powers's story unfolds, we see that events have a way of taking their toll on the extended family at whose core are these siblings. Late in the book, there is a passage regarding the maternal grandparents, the male figure of whom had long been estranged from his grandsons due to a severe falling out between himself and their father. When notice of the grandfather's death is passed on to Joseph from his uncle, we find that this estrangement had taken its toll on the grandparents' relationship as well; only at death is a tragic secret revealed.

In a supreme irony, the folding back of time, at the end, finds the gansta rap son of Ruth, grandson of the physicist whose "experiment in racial entropy" gives the story its initial impetus, repeating the path that his grandfather had a half-century before. He listens to Louis Farrakhan, and concludes - with a wisdom far beyond his years, and totally contrary to his demeanor - that Farrakhan's message is all wrong: The arrow of time really flows in only one direction, and that direction is measured by the increase in entropy.

Powers - a polymath for sure - throws an awful lot at the reader, leaving it up to him to sort it all out. But at its best - and the "best" is there page after page - Powers's prose simply leaps off the page. Nowhere is this better than when he describes music and the effect that a perfect voice can have on the human heart and sensibilities. He writes so beautifully about music and the power of the human voice that the pages themselves literally sing.

This is not a book that can be adequately summarized in so few words. It is a great and IMPORTANT book.
Bob ZeidlerThe Time of Our Singing: A Novel Overview

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