Details
Synopsis
David Strom is Jewish, Delia Daley is black, and when they meet in 1939 they fall in love, almost against their wills, and eventually get married. Their three children, who come of age during the Civil Rights struggle, must face a society in which racism and bigotry are inevitably going to play a part in their lives. A New York Times Notable Book for 2003.
| Size | | Length: | 672 pages | | Height: | 9.5 in | | Width: | 6.5 in | | Thickness: | 1.8 in | | Weight: | 36.0 oz |
Industry Reviews
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"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."
Kirkus Reviews (10/15/2002)
"[A] heady, panoramic novel, scored, like so much of Powers's work, for full orchestra....Passage after passage carries us to what feels like the innermost sanctum of the singer's art....But while THE TIME OF OUR SINGING rewards on many levels--musical, structural, intellectual--the characters cannot heft the ancient burden of their theme."
New Yorker - Sven Birkerts (01/13/2003)
"[Y]ou can't help thinking, as you make your sometimes laborious way through the novel..., that there's something essentially unresolved beneath the fascinating contrapuntal writing. Part of the problem is Powers himself. 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. With the possible exception of David and of Delia's imposing physician father, you never really believe in this family. You accept that what happens to them, or people like them, is real; but you don't really feel it. Like the characters, certain other elements, more of them than usual for a Powers novel, strike you as constructed rather than organic. The last third of the novel feels exhausted; as it lumbers through history from Hiroshima to the Million Man March, you feel that Powers is dutifully ticking items off a laundry list of race-related episodes in American history. But in the end, the real problem may lie in Powers's subject. For all the daring of his idiosyncratic approach to writing about race, it's not clear just what it is about race in America that music, and physics, can finally reveal--except that the problem is intractable."
New York Times - Daniel Mendelsohn (01/26/2003)
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