A Clash of Cultures
BROWN, ROSELLEN
A Clash of Cultures The Time of Our Singing By Richard Powers Farrar Straus Giroux. 640 pp. $28.00. Reviewed by Rosellen Brown Author, "Half a Heart," "Street Games" What a pity that C.P....
...We see David Strom and Delia Daley meeting in Washington at a Marian Anderson concert held outside the Lincoln Memorial, because Anderson was forbidden by the DAR to sing at Constitution Hall...
...But his is not the way, say, a James Michener plodded through territory with researchers providing supporting material...
...Worse, she cannot forgive her parents, particularly her white father-"the whitest man in the world"-for stirring the racial pot, for daring to think his children could make a place for themselves in America...
...Yet, judging from a very informal survey of well-read friends, other writers and academic acquaintances-in spite of his consistently ecstatic reviews, the major prizes his books have secured and the MacArthur grant that he won at age 32-Powers is not only far from a household name, he seems little known compared with many infinitely less interesting novelists...
...The strands of the killing tighten for decades...
...My parents had tried, and the results were my life....' Like so many novels, it is the unwinding here that is least satisfying...
...Despite the strong dissatisfaction of Delia's super-middle-middle class parents, she marries David...
...On such a curve, events can move continuously into their own local future while turning back onto their own past...
...Who, finally, gets to answer these questions...
...And finally, Joseph acquiesces: "Race trumped love as surely as it colonized the loving mind...
...Yet there are flights of description here that almost-almost-manage to convey a joy meant to represent qualities of spirit and psychology...
...In the end, Joseph, tired of feeling emotionally barren, casts his lot with his sister and opts for the faceto-face connection that uses art without isolating it and its creators in the chill of the concert hall...
...His triumphant career as a tenor is built before our eyes ("I'm going to be the Negro Fischer-Dieskau," he promises early on), and culminates in his leaving the U. S. to head a group of singers of ancient music in Europe...
...It has posited so many conundrums, has illustrated, irrefutably, such endemic American racism, family antagonisms and existential tensions that itseemsto me any narrative solution must skimp on the challenges that have come before...
...However one falls on such a question, Powers has dramatized the difficulties of the marriage of bird and fish and their offspring with a monumental and often painful candor...
...She turns on her brothers and attacks them for the irrelevance of their music...
...Against the dictates of probability and good sense, they are brought together rather mysteriously...
...Nothing," says one of Jonah's earliest voice teachers, like David an émigré from European brutalities, "nothing in our animal past calls for anything as gratuitous as song...
...In addition to many careers, love lives, intersections, and missed emotional connections among these bright and complicated people, we have the unscrolling of the facts of African-American public life in the second half of the 20th century...
...In Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance, Prisoner's Dilemma, The Goldbug Variations, Operation Wandering Soul, Gain, and Plowing the Dark, this polymath with a canny ear for ordinary conversation has made deep forays into history, medicine, physics, music, corporate malfeasance, environmental disaster, and seemingly every other aspect of American life...
...But the boys' devotion to what some call "white music" makes them especially vulnerable...
...Is Jonah disloyal to his race when he sings madrigals or Mozart...
...Avoid doing music...
...Whether readers not equally attracted will be held by the many titles from Jonah's repertoire and the soaring approximations of sound is hard to say...
...The other, in many ways the center of the novel, is the prodigally brilliant Jonah...
...Stanley Elkin once cautioned in an essay, "In prose, music is very hard to do, unconvincing as lyrics a cappella on a page...
...The effects can be both dazzling and daunting, generating narrative heat and narrative cool...
...His personal past, which he would rather not acknowledge, seemingly brings into the mix his work in the early '40s with the developers of the atomic bomb...
...One line stands out as a vivid distillation of the whole...
...Perhaps Powers' new and in many respects most accessible novel will awaken the readership he deserves...
...But this would be a difficult novel to end convincingly...
...A wildly inventive, chance-taking postmodernist, he can create realistic people in a clotted, demanding, rewardingly lively style...
...Each such mini lesson sounds like a guilty recognition of all that the boys, lost in their music, failed to hear...
...But in this hall, time stands still, afraid to do so much as breathe...
...Twenty blocks and 16 years away-depending on your clock-is the Audubon Ballroom, where Malcolm X will die...
...He grants some of his characters a plausible but borderline-sentimental road out of their despair...
...another he does away with in a paragraph, one of those narrative shrugs that make the closing compressed pages of Middlemarch so infuriating...
...Already, a million lifelines lead there...
...And in the end, when racial politics takes center stage, their distant echoes will turn out to have been a noise to be acted on as well as heard...
...Her father, a doctor, is a marvelously rendered old guard patriarch with an impressive command of German, determined to yield to no one...
...He can also pull the structural rug out from under them and play with perspective, shatter the plane, fling at us Disney and Oz, word games, fairytales, DNA, and Islamic fundamentalism, voice interrupting voice...
...Each time we hear about something going on offstage-race riots, James Meredith's march, Emmett Till's and Martin Luther King Jr.'s deaths-we are reminded that there are no individual lives enacted outside a larger history...
...Already, that murder is happening-on this block, the next, a mile away, more distant prisons...
...Powers' 1991 Goldbug Variations, starting with its punning title, demonstrated that he is so at ease with music, he does not merely gesture toward the subject...
...When most of my queries elicited a heart-sinking "Richard who...
...The Time of Our Singing alternates an omniscient narrator with the first-person voice of Joseph Strom, the second son of a German-Jewish émigré physicist and his talented, sensible black wife...
...One would expect them to have embraced the author of a novel (Galatea 2.2) featuring a character named Richard Powers who enters into an intense Pygmalion-like relationship with a computer named Helen that has read more than they have, and was sorry to encounter the same blank response...
...To bring into focus this life where selective attention is not an option, the third Strom child, Ruth, enters the picture as an angry, alienated young woman who, with her husband, runs with the Black Panthers...
...And this time no metafictional sleight of hand is employed...
...He has published eight books since 1985, most separated by two years, many huge in scope and length, all challenging...
...Da" is an endearing but largely absent, as well as absent-minded, professor whose obsession is "exploring curves in time...
...Joseph is one of the Stroms' two musical sons...
...Whether gratuitous means inexplicably glorious or without utility is one of the questions this richly involving novel asks and in part tries to answer...
...This, I think, is a tribute to the ambitiousness of his vision-its virtue and its liability...
...Snow died too soon to have read the novels of Richard Powers...
...Is Joseph's uneaseplayingjazz piano a confirmation that their "performance had been whiteness, the hardest piece to make both believable and worth listening to...
...While Delia tries to placate her parents, David, like Michael Chabon's Joseph in the similarly exhaustive Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, waits anxiously for news of the family he had to abandon, and ultimately lost, to the Nazis...
...For all of its doorstop size and typically exhaustive (often exhausting) detail, it tells a rich, disturbing, deeply engaging story that raises urgent questions...
...I turned to a sample of younger, generally hip grad students...
...What this "bird and fish" who must make a nest they can comfortably inhabit and secure against danger have most in common is music, David's love of it and Delia's talent as an aspiring singer...
...Freedom Riders one state away are rounded up andjailed...
...THE BOYS and their sister Ruth must deal with the confusions and contradictions of all biracial children...
...No writer committed to bridging the worlds of science (mainly, though not solely, technology) and fiction has produced so formidable and complex a body of work...
...Of their two parents, the loving and competent Delia is the one most available...
...As Jonah sings Dowland's "'Elizabeth's ships sail out to sudden new continents...
...There was no middle place to stand...
...Powers has spun so thick a web (including perhaps a few too many iterations and variations) that almost any resolution would feel like a simplification...
...Like most of Powers' work, the story covers a long span, wavering back and forth from the 1930s to the '90s...
Vol. 85 • November 2002 • No. 6
