Richard Powers sings America’s bittersweet song  By    |
  Monday, February 9, 2004 Filed under: Uncategorized Tags: ,
The Time of Our Singing, Richard Powers‘ most recent addition to
his oeuvre, is the kind of novel that comes so close to
perfection that a reader asks ‘How?’ How does he know all the
things he does? How was he able to incorporate them into the
novelistic form? How does he manage to live in a society that
hates very bright people like the Joker hates Batman and
survive, not to mention achieve all he has?  The book is about
the Strom family. The parents, Delia and David, meet at Marian
Anderson‘s historical performance in front of the Lincoln
memorial in 1939. Anderson had been barred from performing in
Constitution Hall because the Daughters of the American
Revolution, its owners, did not want it soiled by a Negro’s
presence. Despite the fact Delia cannot even drop into a coffee
shop with David in segregated Washington, D.C., the classically
trained singer and the physicist from Germany fall