Limited Powers

...At the very moment they experience the utter bleakness of abandonment, Powers's favored characters glimpse some benign possibility built into the universe, itself vulnerable, faintly but unmistakably detectable amid suffering and injustice...

...You turn in the entranceway of illusion, gaping down the airplane aisle, and you make it out...

...How high would you like to point the finger...

...Brought together by their love for music, they defy the obvious obstacles and marry...

...The only remarkable fact was that the story made the papers...

...But, curiously, there's also in Powers a source of bedraggled hopefulness...

...The same thing happens at the end of Plowing the Dark (2000), when Taimur Martin, released at last by the Islamic fundamentalists who have held him hostage in Lebanon, grasps "a truth only solitude reveals"—namely, the fact of our abandonment here, in a far corner of sketched space...

...The inspiration here is Einstein, who—in an often-quoted letter from 1955 written to console friends over the death of a loved one—said that "the distinction between past, present, and future is only an illusion, even if a stubborn one...

...The gnomic patter on time can be quite maddening...

...It was the last white question I ever asked her...

...In Operation Wandering Soul (1993), which meditates on the abuse and suffering of children from every conceivable angle, a surgeon works frantically in the aftermath of a grade-school shooting spree, sewing up holes in small bodies, sorting out those who are beyond help: Once again, the bullet sprayer is just another sleepless burn-baby one degree worse than the rest of us, turned by ubiquitous state-sponsored terrorism, the housing-project prison on all sides of him, into trying to out-horror horror...

...But then, in such a world, who we are must be all things...

...Joseph is a pianist...

...His next novel, we may hope, will be something quite different, something less cosmic and more accountable to the quotidian...

...What she needed, in order to forgive our race and live here in peace, was faith's flip side...

...In reality, there is only ocean," what we call past and present and future all together...

...That's what we've called it forever, and it's so cheap, so self-promoting, to invent a new vocabulary for every goddamned thing, at this late a date...

...He's imagining some revolutionary activity...

...His characters chat about RNA templates and the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience the way Elmore Leonard's con men and thugs mull over a heist...

...Helen has digested masses of great literature, on which she can discourse expertly...

...Butcher, baker, ex-war criminal sponsored by the NSA, short-order loner, Veteran of Foreign Police Action, Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, crazed chemmed-out cardboard apartment dweller...

...All the things the Panthers typically did...

...Then, just as quickly: no nation...

...Ruth, the youngest, is also musically gifted, but after the death of their mother in a fire she gravitates toward the radicalism of the 1960s, marrying a member of the Black Panthers...

...Systematically, the U.S...

...So, at the end of Galatea 2.2 (1995), the protagonist, also named Richard Powers, understands at last what the neural net he's been program-ming—Helen, she's called—lacks in order to achieve the goal of fully modeling human consciousness...

...In response, Ruth gives him a look "too weary even for disgust...

...Does anyone really believe this...

...are Powers's trademark...

...So it's not surprising that Powers's eighth and most recent novel, The Time of Our Singing, is about the structure of time (with reference to the special theory of relativity), the nature of music, and the American dilemma of race—with special attention paid to how those three somehow shed light on one another...

...And then Rick divines the solution: "She'd had the bit about the soul fastened to a dying animal...

...The story of the Stroms is told in a fractured chronology that is supposed to illustrate the novel's thesis about time...

...But when Rick gives her a dose of news from the last five years, she comes a cropper on the story of a man who has a stroke while driving and causes a minor accident, whereupon the driver of the other vehicle attacks him with a tire iron: "The only motive aside from innate insanity seemed to be race...

...Perhaps that's because the faith that informs his books has nothing to do with the personal deity of ordinary belief...

...Powers stages the disintegration of the Stroms with grim determinism—while sharing their hope for the future...

...This isn't exactly the sort of faith that preaches well or is likely to spring up in a foxhole...

...It's a Damascus road experience: "From that moment...

...After Ruth's Black Panther husband is, in effect, murdered by the authorities, Joseph hesitantly asks her what she and her husband had been doing earlier when they were in flight from the law...

...There's real novelistic brainpower in the way Powers brings huge swaths of such material into book after book...

...Dispensing cornflakes...

...I'm not sure exactly what this means, but it appears to reduce Powers's quest for the Big Picture to an absurdity...

...everything becomes fair game in the search for connective tissue: the quiz-show scandals, the Oppenheimer case, the shady doings behind selecting this year's homecoming queen...

...Unfortunately, that brainpower seems to disappear when he tries to pull it all together to create the Big Picture—for the Big Pictures he ends up discovering never turn out to be much more than what you'd find on the op-ed page of the New York Times...

...It's the determinism of Zola and Dreiser, updated with the late-twentieth-century vocabulary of the academic left...

...What had they been doing...

...See, for instance, his second novel, Prisoner's Dilemma (1988), when the narrator describes the transformation of his father, a high school teacher who experiences a revelation while "lecturing about the importance of the XYZ Affair...

...Evidently they do...

...But Powers himself must see that with The Time of Our Singing, he has gone as far as he can in the direction he started with his first book...

...Running a shelter program for kids...

...But for Helen, this revelation takes all the zest out of the project...

...BY JOHN WILSON Ever since 1985, when he published his first novel, Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance, at the age of twenty-eight, Richard Powers has been pegged as the brainiest American writer of his generation, equally at home in both of C.P Snow's "Two Cultures" of science and literature...

...But what the right hand gives, the left hand takes away...

...Their happiest moments come when the children are young and the family sings together—and the pages describing this happiness are marvelous, showing how their singing brings into reality the future that David and Delia first envisioned, where the bird and the fish can make a nest...

...This agitprop consorts uneasily with the novel's ruminations on time and music...

...Surely the case is much stronger, as Jeremy Begbie has suggested, for music giving weight to the reality of time...

...The eldest, Jonah, is a musical prodigy who achieves a career as a singer of the classical repertoire, eventually joining the vanguard of the early music revival...

...We feel a river," a physicist explains...

...The "single, linked quilt" that is History takes on a cosmic aspect, a tapestry in which all time is present: "There is no becoming...

...If our father was right," Joseph muses, "time doesn't flow, but is...

...In Powers's novel, the physicist obsessed with time is David Strom, a German Jewish refugee who has landed a job at Columbia University...

...She needed to hear about that animal fastened to a soul that, for the first time, allowed the creature to see through soul's parasite eyes how terrified it was, how forsaken...

...Physicists and philosophers are at this moment engaged in vigorous debate between those who hold to a "tenseless" understanding of time and those who maintain that cosmic time is "tensed" and thus the passage of time real...

...Now, in The Time of Our Singing, Powers has moved from his usual Big Pictures to the Biggest Picture of all: time itself, which—it turns out— doesn't exist...

...A book about something, not about everything...

...How many years have you fought to hold at bay this hideous aloneness, only now discovering that it shelters the one fact of any value...

...Powers turns sixty years of history into a grotesque caricature, America into Amerika, with capsule summaries of salient events baldly inserted in the narrative: "For one brief moment, it was nation time, crowds of people chanting, their voices shaking with the belief that their hour had finally come...

...For God's sake, call it God...

...At heart, he is a religious novelist, though this seems not to have been noticed by most of his admirers...

...Spanning the decades from that meeting in front of the Lincoln Memorial to the end of the twentieth century, the novel is largely narrated by the second of their three children, Joseph...

...There is just is...

...Who do you want for your guilty party...

...Such attempts at unlikely synergies John Wilson is editor of Books & Culture...

...In such a world, all the things that we will ever be or were, we are...

...And music...

...Realizing that his students are living their lives "in complete ignorance of the Big Picture," he sees that "the traditional teaching of history as assorted facts means nothing...

...Meanwhile, theologians are holding a debate about God and time, an argument more than two thousand years old but particularly heated just now...

...This is the truth that enterprise would deny...

...Powers offers pages that treat music with dazzling authority, and yet, when he seeks to make music take his side in his argument with time, he seems stubbornly arbitrary...

...Attending Marian Anderson's 1939 Easter concert on the Mall in Washington—arranged after the Daughters of the American Revolution had denied Anderson the opportunity to sing in Constitution Hall—David meets a young black woman, Delia Daley, who is so caught up in the magic of the moment that she is singing along with Anderson...

...government buried Black Power...