Richard Powers

Formal patterning has always been a predominant feature of Richard Powers's fiction. Powers doesn't so much tell stories (although his fiction has plenty of narrative power) as allow them to emerge from the interplay of buried forces, illustrated most fundamentally, perhaps, by the DNA molecule, the quest for the stucture of which is dramatized in The Gold-Bug Variation (and in turn is associated with the formal patterning of music, represented by J.S. Bach's use of counterpoint.) Typically a Powers novel connects two narrative "strands" together in such a way that the result--the novel itself--exceeds the effects each story might have produced separately, creating something "new." (Gain, for example, poses the story of a woman fighting ovarian cancer against the history of the company that very likely produced the fertilizer that caused the cancer, offering up a more complex perspective on the depicted events in the process; Plowing the Dark accomplishes the same effect by juxtaposing the development of an advanced version of virtual reality with the plight of a man taken hostage in Lebanon, who has, of course, only the "virtual" reality he can summon up inside his head.)

The Time of Our Singing is every bit as ambitious as Powers's previous novels in its themes (history, the nature of time itself), but in this case his treatment of these themes is at least as heavy-handed as the themes are profound. It's not that Powers lacks insight or sensitivity in his approach to the novel's most incendiary theme--race--but his insights seem too explicitly telegraphed, the formal patterning and its suggestiveness too pat. I agree with Sven Birkerts: ". . .Powers also wants to fathom the root brutalities of race, and at this he is less successful. If he has always fallen short in the presentation of viscerally compelling characters (his are too often fleshed-out tendencies, personalities conveniently narrowed around their obsessions), he has generally compensated with the intricacy of his designs and with sentences rich in ideas. But his previous subjects. . .lent themselves more readily to his formalism." The Time of Our Singing either points up the limitations of Powers's kind of formalism, or it reveals Powers's ambitions in this instance to be leading him in a direction not well-suited to his strengths as a novelist. Or both.

To say that Powers "has always fallen short in the presentation of viscerally compelling characters" is to say only that he has attempted to exploit the possibilities of fiction in a way that doesn't rely on "viscerally compelling characters" to engage the reader's interest. He wants the reader to involve him/herself in the "intricacy" of design, to find in the tracing out of the incremental, spiralling pattern a source of interest at least as compelling as character identification, if not more so, since Powers's novels make it clear that the writer's job is not merely to tell stories and evoke characters, but to use such things as story and character to make something fresh from the form, to find the means to unite story, character, and theme with form in a way that is mutually reinforcing: character is tied to the evolving revelations of form, formal ingenuity itself embodies and discloses theme. It is said that Powers is a novelist interested in "ideas," especially scientific ideas, but even here Powers uses science--in The Time of Our Singing, quantum physics--to help construct formal patterns that, while illustrative of the ideas and their implications, are also themselves aesthetically provocative.

But in The Time of Our Singing, Powers seems to want his overlapping episodes and cross-narrative echoes to do more than reverberate with implied or suggestive meaning. He wants his complex construction to carry a heavy thematic load indeed, no less than the racial history of the United States in the twentieth century. He wants to sum up that history through his emblematic characters (a pair of biracial brothers attempting to make it the all-white world of classical music) and his narrative stops at key events in postwar history (the Emmett Till murder, the 60s riots, the Million Man March). He wants the novel to dramatize the intractability of racial attitudes, the consequences of struggling with those attitudes (or, in the case of one of the brothers, Jonah, depicted in the novel as a musical prodigy of gargantuan proportions, of attempting to avoid them), the fate of idealism in such a morally compromised country as the United States. These themes come off as, at best, obvious, if anything even more banal because of the elaborate structure supporting them; it's a needlessly labored way of proffering "ideas" that don't require such circuitous treatment.

In my opinion, the most intriguing theme Powers pursues in this novel is the putative conflict between high art (as represented by Western classical music) and folk or popular art (as represented by various forms of African-American music). Is Jonah guilty of betraying his race by attempting to distinguish himself as a singer of the white man's music, or is he demonstrating that serious art is beyond race? But I have to say that, at best, Powers equivocates on the matter. On the one hand, Jonah's musical performances are almost always described in a rapturous manner (over the course of a 630-page novel, this actually become rather tiresome), as if he had indeed found himself in a realm that denies cultural markers. On the other, Jonah acquires a tinge of moral dishonor that he never really loses. That he dies of injuries sustained during the Los Angeles riots unavoidably implies he only gets what is coming to him. There is finally a tone of political correctness in Powers's portrayal of these matters that sounds some disappointingly flat notes.

On the other hand, I cannot agree with Daniel Mendelsohn, who in his review of the novel writes that Powers's "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. (Beautiful brushwork, for one: Powers has never been a writer of lovely sentences. . . ." If Mendelsohn means by "lovely sentences" the kind of safe, pseudo-poetic figurative language that passes for "good writing" in too much literary fiction, then I would agree that Powers's prose is not "lovely." But if Mendelsohn is suggesting that Powers has no prose style, that he sacrifices language to the contrivances of his "elaborate installations," then I have to say that Mendelsohn is not reading Richard Powers very attentively. Take, for instance this remarkable bit of Cubistic prose::

"My brother's face was a school of fishes. His grin was not one thing, but a hundred darting ones. I have a photograph--one of the few from my childhood that escaped incineration. In it, the two of us open Christmas presents on the nubby floral-print sofa that sat in our front room. His eyes look everywhere at once; at his own present, a three-segment expanding telescope; at mine, a metronome; at Rootie, who clutches his knee, wanting to see for herself; at our photographing father deep in his act of stopping time; at Mama, just past the picture's frame; at a future audience, looking, from a century on, at this sheltered Christmas creche, long after all of us are dead."

Or this passage, evoking the narrator's struggle to understand his own musical experience:

"The game was leverage, control. Speed and span, how to crack open the intervals, widen them from on high, raise the body's focus from finger into arm, lengthen the arm like a hawk on the wing. I'd coat the line in rubato, or tie every note into a legato flow. I'd round the phrase or clip it, then pedal the envelope and let it ring. I'd turn the baby grand into a two-manual harpsichord. Play, stop, lift, rewind, repeat, stop, lift, back a line, back a phrase, back two bars, half a bar, the turn, the transition, the note, the thinnest edge of attack. My brain sank into states of perfect tedium laced with intense thrill. I was a plant extracting petals from sunlight, water wearing away a continent's coast."

Powers's prose style may not be conventionally "lovely," but its rough spots are part of what makes it compelling. It has an exuberance, a headlong rush of energy, of determination to describe as vividly as possible the phenomena under scrutiny, that makes most workshop-derived "loveliness" seem dessicated in comparison. Powers provides plenty of arresting images--"My brother's face was a school of fishes," "a plant extracting petals from sunlight"--but his prose is distinctive for its stop-start rhythm, its unrestrained alliteration, its use of lists and various kinds of cumulative phrasing.

It is precisely his style, his immersion in language, combined with his formal imagination, that has made me an admirer of Richard Powers's fiction. Unfortunately, in The Time of Our Singing (as he also did in Operation Wandering Soul), Powers too tightly harnesses both style and form to the exposition of "theme" in a manner that is much too earnest for my taste.

Comments

[Mr. Waggish]

Great review. Powers thinks (and writes) like a scientist or engineer, not a lateral-thinking writer who works by suggestion and insinuation. He has a lot more in common stylistically with Douglas Hofstadter than Faulkner. I don't think he sees his towering architectural edifices as "artificial" any more than most writers see their work as specifically "literary." Powers specifically injects social concerns into these edifices in a much more overt way than most of the Oulipo writers ever did, and so runs the danger of coming off as simplistic and schematic. I think he does, but he's still an interesting archetype.

[ed]

Very interesting review, Dan. And I'm very sorry to ramble here, but I'm a big RP fan.

I think you're likely to be disappointed by future Powers offerings. Because it seems clear to me that Powers has been gradually shifting away from his conceptual dual narratives, hoping to evolve in order to convey life with a more human voice, one in which language and Powers' remarkable erudition take a back seat to the human experience. It's a highly ambitious development, particularly interesting given that it comes uncharacteristically mid-career. But, as far as I'm concerned, it does makes Powers one of the most exciting novelists to watch at the present time.

I share some reservations myself about whether the twain can meet, but you overlook one pivotal part in The Time of Our Singing in which Powers DOES succeed at merging the conceptual with the human. And that's the whole episode with Joseph working as a small-time piano player in an Atlantic City casino. Powers plunges deep into Joseph's loneliness and the sad routine that keeps him functioning. But part of Joseph hasn't completely acquiesced. Joseph begins playing specific tunes, almost sending out a code of novelties in desperation (this is juxtaposed with Powers describing the transformation of Atlantic City during off season). Eventually, these efforts attract a girl. Rather interestingly, once Joseph and the girl become more involved, race becomes more of an issue to Joseph personally.

There are several fascinating subtexts going on during this sustained section: (1) loneliness transcends all races, (2) Joseph cannot completely escape into the possible race trappings of being a small-time piano player, and (3) when Joseph becomes involved with the everyday world around him, racial identity becomes actuated. But where Powers stops short is exploring precisely HOW Joseph can adapt. And this is the glass ceiling that Powers needs to push himself through to be completely at one with the emotional jugular he clearly wants to strike.

Now before this novel, we saw Powers, as prodigious as his powers are with language and concepts, offering such complex human issues in spurts. The man who calculates his tip based on how frequently the waitress talks to him in Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance, the fascinating family dynamic of Prisoner's Dilemma and the love and betrayal (interestingly enough, enmeshed with the burning zeal for knowledge) within The Gold Bug Variations. But Gain, was the first real attempt to tie in the conceptual with the explicitly personal. Powers' Dreiser-style expose may not have entirely suited his metier (indeed, it was considered by some to be one of his most reviled novels), but he did manage to shift the dual narrative to something more tangible, nay more existential, than previous efforts in comparing the decay of a soap company to the decay of a woman dying with cancer. The woman's backbreaking efforts to prepare a potluck dish, the like.

Then at the end of Plowing the Dark, we not only have that incredible section devoted to how geeks feel about the game "Adventure," but that surprise ending which suggests that, no matter how devastating our intellectual challenges, human experience marchs forward. The one interesting thing about this motif, which I suspect has been embedded in Powers for quite a while, is that, like the lengthy Joseph section I cited above, we have everything up to the point of when humans make the decision to adapt. But here, Powers either stops short or, in the case of The Gold Bug Variations, the hero (Stuart Ressler) is reduced to a humiliatnig defeat. I'm not certain if Powers is explicitly rejecting the accepted idea of a protagonist changing to a certain moment, whether his narratives are more designed to convey the crushing blows of mundane life, or whether his narratives are more like interchangeable engines to propel Powers' inexhaustible gas, the schematic misperception that Waggish suggests above.

But one thing I'm pretty sure about. Powers WILL get beyond this point. Because every novel he turns out is a evolution of this struggle. And it seems to be getting easier for him to work this problem out in a sustained narrative.

[Dan Green]

There are any number of good moments in The Time of Our Singing. I just think that, taken as a whole, it's overwrought.

I actually liked Gain quite a lot. I didn't in this case find that the "explicitly personal" wore out its welcome or that the architecture of the novel was inappropriate to its content. It was schematic, but exploited its scheme adeptly. I don't think TTOOS does.

Ultimately I'd have to say that a deliberate attempt on a novelist's part to put more emotion into his work is doomed to fail--doomed to sentimentality. If such emotion has to be conjured up, pretty clearly it's not something the writer does well, anyway.

[R A Rubin]

Lit critiques are so cryptic now, they read like art criticism, unreadable. I think I'll read the book.