The Review of Contemporary Fiction

The Time of Our Singing, by Richard Powers
reviewed by Joseph Dewey

Untitled document

Richard Powers. The Time of Our Singing. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003. 631 pp. $27.00.

For Richard Powers, in fictions that are among the most invigorating and humane of the last fifteen years, art is a place, a sheltering space apart where characters, socially angular to the point of nerdy eccentricity or emotionally terrorized by the malevolence of the real world, gratefully seek protective retreat. Powers enriches this exploration of the imagination through a familiarity with contemporary sciences, finding within such unpromising theorizing rich metaphors that give depth to this dynamic of retreat and return. The Time of Our Singing is Powers’s most compelling treatment of this theme, a generational narrative of a biracial family that is as well a deeply affective meditation on time, racial identity, and the complex engine of memory, big ideas that are here offered within a narrative of heartbreaking poignancy in which (without that forced sort of Forrest Gump hokiness) characters confront even participate in the landmark moments of mid-century history, from Hiroshima to the L.A. riots.

At the historic 1939 Marian Anderson Easter Sunday concert at the Lincoln Memorial, an African American woman, a promising Philadelphia gospel singer, chances to fall in love with a European immigrant—a lapsed Jew, a mathematician, and theoretician—whose family had disappeared into Hitler’s concentration-camp archipelago and whose work will come to figure in the Manhattan Project. Perhaps naively, they determine that they will raise their three children beyond race. The narrative tracks their difficult struggles to achieve racial identity amid the harrowing crosscurrents of an America compelled to examine just such questions. What forges the family is a love of music, all kinds, that provides a gentle refuge from the hard press of street racism. In such a climate of harsh division (haunted the by shadows of Hitler’s ethnic cleansing and of Hiroshima) Powers offers breathtaking descriptions of the harmonies of music, the difficult intimacies of love, and the abiding matrix of family. And he ruminates on time itself: the father spends his university career theorizing on time as a continuum, which Powers himself tests formally with a narrative that shuttles throughout more than fifty years and in a closing chapter that audaciously borders on speculative fiction. Lingering within the enthralling narrative space that Powers here constructs, a reader feels indeed in the presence of a generation’s voice who, only in his midforties, may just now be coming into his full.


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction The Time of Our Singing, by Richard Powers reviewed by Joseph Dewey Untitled document Richard Powers. The Time of Our Singing. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003. 631 pp. $27.00. For Richard Powers, in fictions that are among the most invigorating and humane of the last fifteen years, art is a place, a sheltering space apart where characters, socially angular to the point of nerdy eccentricity or emotionally terrorized by the malevolence of the real world, gratefully seek protective retreat. Powers enriches this exploration of the imagination through a familiarity with contemporary sciences, finding within such unpromising theorizing rich metaphors that give depth to this dynamic of retreat and return. The Time of Our Singing is Powers’s most compelling treatment of this theme, a generational narrative of a biracial family that is as well a deeply affective meditation on time, racial identity, and the complex engine of memory, big ideas that are here offered within a narrative of heartbreaking poignancy in which (without that forced sort of Forrest Gump hokiness) characters confront even participate in the landmark moments of mid-century history, from Hiroshima to the L.A. riots. At the historic 1939 Marian Anderson Easter Sunday concert at the Lincoln Memorial, an African American woman, a promising Philadelphia gospel singer, chances to fall in love with a European immigrant—a lapsed Jew, a mathematician, and theoretician—whose family had disappeared into Hitler’s concentration-camp archipelago and whose work will come to figure in the Manhattan Project. Perhaps naively, they determine that they will raise their three children beyond race. The narrative tracks their difficult struggles to achieve racial identity amid the harrowing crosscurrents of an America compelled to examine just such questions. What forges the family is a love of music, all kinds, that provides a gentle refuge from the hard press of street racism. In such a climate of harsh division (haunted the by shadows of Hitler’s ethnic cleansing and of Hiroshima) Powers offers breathtaking descriptions of the harmonies of music, the difficult intimacies of love, and the abiding matrix of family. And he ruminates on time itself: the father spends his university career theorizing on time as a continuum, which Powers himself tests formally with a narrative that shuttles throughout more than fifty years and in a closing chapter that audaciously borders on speculative fiction. Lingering within the enthralling narrative space that Powers here constructs, a reader feels indeed in the presence of a generation’s voice who, only in his midforties, may just now be coming into his full.

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