MixedThe Times (UK)Smith latches on to one of these facts [about Nick] and completely forgets about the others. His Nick is the son of a man who runs a hardware business, which makes it hard to see how he made it to Yale, bond dealing and the high-class social circles of Daisy and Tom. There is no failed romance with a Midwestern debutante of the kind that Scott Fitzgerald experienced himself and imagined for Nick. Instead of fleshing out a backstory from these materials, Smith merely uses Nick as a hook on which to hang a war novel ... \'And\' is Smith’s favourite word. He writes in very short sentences ... The style is not that of Fitzgerald. It is learnt from his mighty opposite, Ernest Hemingway. As are the bars and the brawls and the whores with hearts and the mud of the war and the shellshock. All of which are done very effectively Nick is eminently readable. It is merely misbranded ... it has much more in common with Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms ... The best part of the novel is the sequence telling of the brief love affair with the French girl in Paris when Smith’s Nick is on leave from the front.
Richard Powers
PositiveThe Telegraph (UK)Powers sets himself formidable challenges. Essentially a novelist of ideas, he knows his science inside out ... The chronological structure of The Time of our Singing loops backwards and forwards non-sequentially, in homage to the curvature of post-Einstein space-time ... But it is the mathematical harmony of classical music that engages Powers most profoundly in this book. I cannot think of any novel other than Thomas Mann\'s Dr Faustus that enters so fully into the musical mind ... Sometimes the characters are just not big enough for the ideas: Ruth in particular is more an argument than a realised being. In the end, Powers doesn\'t quite pull all his themes together.
