Biracial family story stays in tune through time

Brian Evenson, Special To The News

Friday, January 10, 2003

In The Time of Our Singing, justly acclaimed novelist Richard Powers offers the moving and complex story of a biracial family.

Jonah, Joseph and Ruth are the children of David Strom, a German Jewish physicist, and Delia Daley, a black doctor's daughter from Philadelphia. Delia and David have a notion, because of a fleeting experience they've shared at an open-air concert, that they can raise their biracial children "beyond race."

They set out to do so, not realizing the barriers and obstacles that will be put before their children.

At the heart of the story are Jonah and Joseph. Jonah becomes a world-class classical singer, while his brother, dragged along by his brother's promise, becomes a reluctant pianist.

Jonah in particular does what he can to avoid thinking about race, to try to find a place for himself in Europe. Though he is moderately successful, he remains haunted by all that he has denied.

Joseph, on the other hand, struggles along behind his brother, his life swallowed up in his brother's.

The third sibling, Ruth, becomes a black activist, choosing to try to improve things in the here and now over an imagined, idealized future. As each sibling chooses his own path, the family falls apart.

Alternating between first-person sections (told from Joseph's perspective) and third-person sections, The Time of Our Singing moves between the story of these three siblings and the story of their parents.

In the latter, we see Delia and David meet, watch them struggle to make a life in a country hostile to interracial marriage. We see Delia's own musical aspirations as well, and see played out David's notions of time and recurrence, see the way in which abstract physics has formed his choices. Between these stories, the novel covers four decades, showing American racial politics from the perspective of a family whose members are unsure of where they stand. Says Jonah, "We should have been real Negroes. Really black. . . . We'd know where we stood anyway."

Powers treats all the stories here with sensitivity, managing to illuminate music with physics and vice versa, creating a complex story which, ultimately, is about people struggling to understand where they might reside in the world. It offers no simple answers. Though more compelling in its first 400 pages than in its last 200 (in which Jonah abandons later classical music for early European music), The Time of Our Singing is by any standard an impressive and worthwhile book, one that understands political consciousness does not have to be divorced from artistic concerns.

There is beautiful writing here, as well as careful and sometimes painful exploration of individual lives in all their difficulty, and real risks. The Time of Our Singing satisfies, as does most of Powers' work, in myriad ways.

Brian Evenson is the author of six books of fiction, the most recent being "Dark Property." He directs the creative writing program at the University of Denver.