Here Powers weaves together the four-note motif of Bach's Goldberg Variations, the four nucleotides (don't ask) described in the structure of DNA, and the tetragrammaton, the four-letter Hebrew word for God ... With his interest in isolated, atomised individuals and his attempts to yoke together seemingly incompatible disciplines, Powers has probably got EM Forster's humanist cry from Howards End, 'only connect', hanging over his writing desk ... The story is told in short episodes that move back and forth across five decades, so that we return again and again to the same events. The novel begins with the competition triumph of Jonah and Joey, but when we return hundreds of pages later to this same event, it is enriched by the new context in which it is placed ... Others may give us more complex characters, but it is rare to find a novel as intellectually and emotionally engaging as this.
There is a great deal to admire in the grand symphonic music that Powers makes of these individual notes. As his vast and complex narrative unfolds, the innumerable humiliations to which the Stroms of all shades are subjected are poignantly evoked; the worst are the most quotidian ... His weakness as a writer is the weakness of all conceptual artists: you may admire his elaborate installations, but you sometimes find yourself missing the simple pleasures of good old-fashioned painting ... More problematic still, he is not a writer whose interest in his characters goes beyond their usefulness as symbolic elements in grand theoretical assemblages ... Powers's blending of unlikely tones in order to probe the problems of a society that continues to insist, all grays to the contrary, on seeing everything in terms of black and white is, more often than not, a fascinating, stimulating and moving artistic imagining of a harmony that continues to elude us in life.
A Ken Burns documentary in the form of a novel, featuring a full syllabus of American history from 1940 on, with a double major in classical musicology (emphasis on voice) and electives in nuclear physics and mathematics and the fate of Eastern European Jewry in the Holocaust ... The premise has promise, but Powers has taken a shortcut to making them singular—he’s made them gifted. A sizable fraction of the book is devoted to superlatives about Jonah’s talent ... There is also an often cloying soundtrack of historical heavy breathing ... And too often in this weepy novel, one is alarmed to discover that the lump in one’s throat is actually a large, semi-digested wad of mismatched images—metaphorical miscegenation, still and always a sin before God and copy editor ... The emotion in this book often seems to have a borrowed, air-guitarish quality. There’s passion here—too much, probably—but it’s finally a novel of received ideas.
On this occasion, Powers’s usual balancing act teeters. Although the lives of the Strom children are elegantly rendered, they often lack enough emotional punch to make them truly affecting. Jonah and Ruth often seem to be illustrating historical currents instead of occupying solid human ground. The author’s prose can become overwrought when dealing with them ... Far more rewarding is his parents’ courtship, as they defy hatred, bigotry and even murder ... They are watched by the affectionate but ultimately sceptical eye of the novel’s finest character, Delia’s father, William, who knows that, in an imperfect world, hybrids often turn out to be less than the sum of their parts.
Powers, when you get right down to it, is more interested in processes and patterns than in people, but when he hits on the right combination of ideas, as he does in his newest book, The Time of Our Singing, he finds a place for people in his celestial clockwork ... Character and story drive most good novels, while theme makes a satisfying byproduct, but for Powers the idea is the engine that makes everything go ... Powers, on the other hand, knows that it's not David and Delia's love that chips away at the bedrock of race, but the family they make of it, their light-skinned children, the vanguard of a world where 'someday everyone will be brown' ... The dilemma galvanizes Powers' gifts and spins some of his novelistic weaknesses into gold ... You care all the same, not just about the way this author opens up a universe of thought and makes you hear the legendary music of the spheres, but also about the fate of a few baffled human beings, muddling their way through to a life worth living.
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.
What Powers does, constantly, is embody technique in the events of the novel and the characters' endlessly fascinating talk. This is a book about smart people arguing about what it means to be that smart, and that gifted ... Sometimes, important plot strands – like Joseph's affair with a Jersey Girl jazz singer – are left hanging, without resolution ... This is a novel about tricks and turns; about the importance both of knowing who you are, and accepting that the knowledge involves you in complicity and complexity.
Powers (Plowing the Dark, etc.) has generated considerable excitement as a novelist of ideas, but as a creator of characters, he is on shakier ground. Here he confronts his weaknesses head-on, crafting a hefty family saga that attempts to probe generational conflicts, sibling rivalries and racial identity ... Powers's premise is intriguing, and the plot's architecture is impressive, informed by the notion, from physics, of space-time wrinkles and time curves. Missing, however, are the pulse-quickening vintage-Powers moments in which his discussions of technology and science open up profound existential quandaries ... Powers deserves credit for taking a risk, but his own experiment reveals his startling tone deafness to the subtle inflections of human experience.
The power of music in its relation to a racially divided family and culture is dramatized with unprecedented brilliance in this panoramic novel ... Powers’s impassioned criticisms of racism are often jarringly strident ... But such awkwardness is subsumed in this rich novel’s verbal agility, depth of characterization, historical and social range, and propulsive readability. And, as a grace note of sorts, Powers demonstrates that he knows as much about musical technique, theory, and history as he seems to know about almost everything else ... The most accessible, and powerful fiction yet from a major American writer who, against all odds, just keeps getting better.
