"The use of music is to remind us how short a time we have a body."
Richard Powers The Time of Our Singing
Finally, finally finished with this. A long, heavy, ambitious novel, it alternates between inspiration and tedium, heartbreak and weariness, often in the course of a chapter, but ultimately cannot sustain its own momentum and runs aground. It's hard to criticize Powers for this--it's difficult to imagine anyone being able to pull off a novel whose central concerns are nothing less than time, race, music, history and culture, all housed within the confines of a mostly compelling story peopled with mostly believable characters. Powers is ultimately better with ideas than characters and the characters here have to bear a heavy load indeed. In the end it's too much to ask of one book and by the time he starts trying to wrap things up, Powers has lost control of the pace. Too much happens too fast and things feel hurried; it's almost as though an editor realized "holy shit! We can't sell an 800 page novel about race, classical music, and theoretical physics!" I can't help feeling that the book needed to be either considerably shorter or even longer. Personally I'd favor the former but I too have an American attention span. There are a few other missteps, how could there not be in a novel this size, but this is still an impressive achievement. I'd suggest tackling it when you're in the mood for something serious and compelling and have, say, a whole week to devote to it.
