ABOUT RACE IN America, about music in history, about atom bombs and “phantom mechanics”—curved space, loopy time, pure chance jump and flow—The Time of Our Singing is an astonishment but not a surprise. Richard Powers has been astounding us almost every other year since 1985, turning intellectual activity into imaginative literature in novels that ask homesick rangers and resident aliens to cope with everything from game theory, molecular biology, and artificial intelligence to such terrorisms as hostage taking and the behavior of “limited liability” corporations. We can no longer be surprised at whatever he dares to think in ink about.
Powers has been warming up for this novel in particular. Prisoner’s Dilemma (1988) ended with a son looking for his sick father, who had run away into the atomic desert of Los Alamos. The Gold Bug Variations (1991) needed Johann Sebastian Bach’s polyphony to crack the genetic code. And Operation Wandering Soul (1993) brought the nonwhite Third World home, to a pediatrics ward in a public hospital in Watts, Los Angeles. As if these sight lines were to triangulate on the American unmentionable—mixed race: “There isn’t a horse alive that’s purebred”—we now have the Stroms.
David Strom is a German Jew who has escaped the Nazi net to profess physics at Columbia University in New York, where his ability “to imagine what goes on inside the smallest matter’s core,” to hear the “harmonies in time” of forces and fields that curve and flow, will be useful during the war to atomic scientists like Rabi, Bethe, Pauli, Von Neumann, Szilard, Teller, and Fermi—“all of them boys, caught up in pure performance. The permanent urge to find and release.” On Easter Sunday 1939, at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., David Strom meets Delia Daley.
Delia is the brilliant daughter of a black Philadelphia doctor; she is also a daytime hospital nurse, a nighttime music student, and a part-time singer in church choirs, with a sound “that could fix the broken world.” She should have had a concert career except that she arrived at the conservatory for her audition wearing the wrong skin. And she’s come to the nation’s capital for the same reason as David and 75,000 other people—to hear Marian Anderson sing in spite of the Daughters of the American Revolution. Against all odds, David and Delia decide to start their own revolution: “Maybe they could make an America more American than the one the country has for centuries lied to itself about being.”
At least they make three more Americans: Jonah, “a year older, a shade lighter,” than his brother, Joey, followed by their darker little sister, Ruth. And so long as all five are gathered around a piano in their derelict house in the northwest borderlands of Manhattan, playing “Crazed Quotations”—a musical game born of David and Delia’s shared belief that “any two melodies could fit together, given the right twists of tempo and turns of key” and that, as Delia imagines it, “in the only world worth reaching, everyone owns all song”—they seem safe enough. But outside, “ever downward, from crazed to numb,” race trumps love “as surely as it colonized the loving mind.” These “halfbreed” children must sing not only for their supper but also for their mother, burned alive in an explosion before she has finished making her music.
“Honey-wheat” Jonah, sent away to music school in Boston at the insistence of Albert Einstein himself, is best at performing “whiteness,” at singing Stockhausen and Schubert and even Palestrina, regressing in harmonic history throughout the novel, all the way back to Gregorian chant, as if his very own backyard hadn’t grown a wonderful bastard music of spirit hollers, cabin songs, field calls, gutbucket, rag, blues, jazz, and scat. “Muddy milk” Joey, his sometime accompanist, has a harder time hiding out in concert halls from an America at race war. On one occasion, he finds himself playing show tunes in an Atlantic City dive. On another, more usefully, in a freedom school in Oakland, California, he teaches old stuff to street kids weaned on rap, for the first time doing work “that wouldn’t have been done if I wasn’t doing it.”
Ruth? She has always lived in the burning world, the real history that torched her mother. While Jonah (“Orpheus in reverse”) sings his way to the monastery, Ruth’s history agonizes onward, from Marian Anderson to the Million Man March, with full stops at Emmett Till, “Bull” Connor, Medgar Evers, Birmingham, Newark, and Watts. Watts is where Jonah finally reads the score. So much for the Cloisters and unicorns. But Ruth is a Black Panther. It’s her freedom school where Joey ends up teaching, and it’s her son, of all the black children lost in space-time, who will be found in the wavelengths of color and pitch in the “somewhen” of his Jewish grandfather.
This is a Richard Powers novel, after all, and as such it must bend our minds as gravity bends time. Einstein on general relativity intersects with Leibniz on music. If, as David Strom dies hoping, most galaxies would rather rotate counterclockwise, then traveling back in folded time is possible, but only if we’ve already been whenever. If time is always now, so is music, “an exercise in occult mathematics by a soul that doesn’t even know it’s counting.” And shame, too—shame is the very air we breathe, the normal respiration of our fearful tribal lungs.