Richard Powers: The Time of Our Singing
Comments: 5
The NYTimes has a long, well-considered review of Richard Powers’s new novel:
‘The Time of Our Singing’: Hidden Harmonies
By Daniel Mendelsohn, New York TimesRichard Powers’s eighth novel, ”The Time of Our Singing,” is his first to focus on the world of classical music, but harmonies of one sort or another have always been his subject. From the start of his career, this prodigiously gifted writer has used fiction to suggest that there are hidden resonances among what could easily seem to be wildly disparate elements.
I’m currently reading Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance and recently finished Plowing the Dark – they’re both brilliant.
I’m a big fan of Powers, even though Mendelsohn’s observation is quite true:
And yet you can’t help thinking, as you make your sometimes laborious way through the novel (it is far too long – or, to quote the famous critique of that ultimate musician, Mozart, filled with “too many notes”), 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.
Earlier in the review, he draws a comparison between Powers and “the acolytes of Don DeLillo” which is also spot on.
Powers’s interest in the very latest expressions of technological culture, his self-conscious awareness of contemporary theoretical issues (Walter Benjamin pops up in “Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance”; game theory gives “Prisoner’s Dilemma” its title) and his penchant for contriving ingenious climactic connections between his scientific and “artistic” subplots make it tempting to see him as one of a group of youngish writers – the literary acolytes of Don DeLillo, you could call them – whose work is marked by a cool, clever, deeply ironic, postmodern hyper-self-consciousness: David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, Dave Eggers. But strip the talking feces away from Franzen’s “Corrections,” or the charming, rather Jimmy Stewartesque stuttering and apologetic footnotes from “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius,” and you don’t really lose anything vital; underneath the pomo swags and ribbons, these are deeply conventional narratives. With Powers, on the other hand, you can’t really separate out any one element – the theories, the paintings, the photos, the capsule biographies of industrialists and actresses – because what the novels are about, what they demonstrate, is the hitherto hidden connections among all those things. However idiosyncratic his technique, the novelists whom Powers really resembles are the 19th-century behemoths, like Balzac or Zola or Tolstoy, who also wanted to show you how everything in society is really intertwined.
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Posted to Books • 2003.01.26 (Sun) • 12:34
Comments
Posted by Derek Mackrell 2003.01.27, 22:09
It’s great to see that I’m not the only fan of Richard Powers. I’ve been following him since I read “The Goldbug Variations” when it first came out, but am yet to meet more than a handful of people who have ever read anything by him. There is some truth in the review I read describing him as “the greatest novelist you’ve never heard of”. I’ve just finished “Gain”, but wasn’t dying on it. I guess I was comparing it to “Galatea 2.2” which was the one before it, and one of my all time favourites.
Posted by jh 2003.01.27, 22:34
Hi, Derek.
Sad but true, “the greatest novelist you’ve never heard of.” Powers really deserves a much bigger audience. Galatea 2.2 is great, and Plowing the Dark was just astonishing: it concludes with a moment of such audacity that I can’t say anything about it without giving it away. Quite literally breathtaking.
You’ve probably read what Sven Birkerts wrote in Esquire (it’s being used as a jacket blurb these days) — Mention Richard Powers’s name to other writers and see them get that faraway look in their eyes: they are calculating the eventual reach of his influence.
Ubelieeev-able! I’ve just finished “The time…” Astonishing, shocking and thoroughly engaging.
More astonishing is the fact that I am not a prodigious reader.
This book has changed all my lives… A place where quantum physics and Bhuddist theory affirm eachother, and make friends with that other timeless bunch of wavelengths, music.
I now have to “make time” for more of R.P’s works, and forget this life for a while longer!
Posted by Chuck Schwartz 2005.10.26, 20:40
Absolutely astonishing, long but perfect, Pyncheon, Ecco, and Powers, I bow at your altar. The Time Of Our Singing is vast, glorious, and life-affirming, by far the best book I’ve read in years. I love novels that fold back on themselves, that leave you with a feeling of closure and that are written in prose that is unique, majestic and poetic. Powers is all this more. It surpasses his Gold Bug and enters that rarefied realm of works of genius.
Posted by catherine fleming 2006.05.01, 10:50
i fell in love with richard powers when 3 farmers came out in 1985. I’ve given away that book half a dozen times to friends. what a brilliant novel! I’ve never in all my years met someone who had read his novels. I worked in a bookstore in santa fe and I remember when Goldbug Variations came out - we sold a few copies but i didn’t take the time to read it then and still haven’t i’m afraid. Operation Wandering Soul is terrific.
After reading the reviews, I can’t wait to read his latest book. I had no idea he was taking on buddhism and physics, both of which I’ve been studying myself lately.
all of his topics are relevant and big. He’s my favorite writer, bar none. And I’ve read thousands.. lots of classics, lots of 20th c. american and british fiction. He’s the best of the lot i think. better than henry james. way better than any beat, romantic, or post-modern whatever. he’s the standard for literature for people who love literature. They just don’t know it, yet. so, cheers to you, richard powers, if you ever read this in cyberspace. I’ve been a fan of yours for going on 20 years now and I thank you from the bottom of my heart for your efforts. You will be remembered as the best of my generation.
well, then there’s toni morrison.. she’s damn good too. (and I also love Julian Barnes and Tom Robbins for fun and Eva Figes for other things…) but you are indeed a master. cheers to all richard powers fans. c. fleming - photographer, editor of essays and books, book collector (Julian Barnes, Eva Figes) landlady, work at home mother of two
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