Physics is out of tune with music

“Only connect,” E.M. Forster famously wrote in his novel “Howard’s End,” meaning that hope for humanity lies in the sympathetic bond between people. But the words might serve ironically as the motto for our present moment, in which the connection between facts that are provided by information seems to matter even more than the connection between people that is nourished by human feeling.

Information is a good thing. But it is composed of facts with which one has only recently become acquainted, facts that have value because they are communicable entities that many people want to possess. Knowledge is a more precious thing than information because it does not have value in the marketplace; you desire knowledge for its own sake, not for the sake of knowing what someone else knows, or for the sake of being able to pass it on to someone else. To put it another way, knowledge means you understand a subject, its causes and consequences, its history and development, its relationship to some fundamental aspect of life. But you can possess a lot of information about something without understanding it.

Richard Powers has become famous for novels crammed with facts: facts about computer language, and corporations, and game theory, and meteorology, and molecular biology. He structures his novels with such subjects, and the subjects also become ready-made themes. In “The Time of Our Singing,” classical music and Einsteinian physics serve as worlds the characters -- a biracial family’s musician children and physicist father -- inhabit, and figure as metaphors for the way memory preserves life’s essential experiences beyond time.

Into this heavy concept-driven framework, Powers inserts his characters: David Strom, a German-Jewish refugee living in New York who lost his family in the Holocaust; Delia Daley, his black Mississippi-born wife; and their three children, Jonah, Joseph, and Ruth. Strom is a prominent physicist who teaches at Columbia, and Delia the daughter of a highly educated doctor and a wonderful amateur singer; their mulatto children all become singers themselves. The novel traces the career of the oldest child, Jonah, a musical prodigy whose career as a legendary tenor runs parallel to the nation’s permanent crisis between blacks and whites.

Told by Joseph, Jonah’s loyal accompanist, “The Time of Our Singing” hits all the dramatic moments in the history of race in America: It begins with the Daughters of the American Revolution forbidding Marian Anderson to sing at Constitution Hall (Eleanor Roosevelt arranged for her to perform at the Lincoln Memorial) and goes on to the forced integration of public schools at Little Rock, Ark.; the torture and murder of Emmett Till; the race riots of the ‘60s. Powers interweaves all this big history into the personal lives and career of his characters: Jonah, disgusted by the racist attitudes he encounters, finally moves to Europe; Joseph ends up playing cocktail lounges in Atlantic City and having a doomed love affair with a white woman; Ruth, the youngest, marries a black militant and, much like Melody in Philip Roth’s “American Pastoral,” becomes politically radicalized and a target of the FBI. Accompanying both the private and personal strands of the novels are references to classical music, mostly, but also to jazz and rock and, less frequently, to physics. They drive home Powers’ theme. The way music and Einstein’s idea of relativity defeat time, thus making the impossible possible, proves that what racism regards as impossible -- black people and white people making brown babies -- is humankind’s brightest possibility.

Now these are lovely sentiments, and one almost feels embarrassed to express what one honestly feels about “The Time of Our Singing,” which is that this is a very unlovely novel. It was just as difficult to offer up a truthful appraisal of Powers’ “Gain,” which told the story of a woman dying of cancer alongside the story of the large corporation whose irresponsibility had caused her illness. Critics seemed cowed by Powers’ virtue, but they also seem daunted by what they like to call his “erudition,” to which they usually append the word “dazzling.” However, the way they express their admiration is a little peculiar. Here’s a typical effusion from a recent review of “The Time of Our Singing,” which describes the theme of Powers’ 1991 novel “The Goldbug Variations.” “The novel,” swoons this reviewer, “involves a mind-bending and ultimately quite moving suggestion, typical of Powers, that Bach’s use of four notes in the Goldberg Variations, the four nucleotides in DNA and the tetragrammaton, the four letters in the Hebrew name of God, are all connected in a way that sheds hopeful light on our understanding of what it means to be human.”

All this fancy stuff, Bach, and nucleotides, and the tetragrammaton is pretty impressive. I for one have no idea what a nucleotide is. But I do know that there is no connection between any of these highfalutin references, and reading the novel didn’t convince me, either. Far from being “quite moving” or shedding “a hopeful light” on the meaning of being human (and how, exactly, does it do that?), mushing all these things together drains Bach of his useless beauty, the structure of DNA of its promise of medical advance, and the tetragrammaton of its mystery and terror. Mushing all these things together is what gets excited college freshmen a B+ and the professor’s suggestion to “Next time, make an outline before you begin writing.”

But critics go nuts over this, maybe because they don’t know what Powers seems to know and conscientiously resist passing judgment; maybe because they’ve grasped that he really doesn’t know anything beyond superficial references and so take a sneaky pleasure in deflating by inflating; maybe because in celebrating this “difficult” novelist they celebrate their own generosity and openness to difficulty, something like Broadway audiences whose reflexive standing ovations are their way of congratulating themselves on being able to afford exorbitantly-priced Broadway tickets.

The proof of critical insincerity lies in what the reviewers say about Powers as a novelist, as opposed to how they pay homage to Powers The Genius. Such criticism would end any other fiction writer’s career.

Here’s a sample from reviews of “The Time of Our Singing”: “Even his most devoted admirers must admit that the novel part of the task -- characters, story, place -- has been harder for him to pull off.” “Powers has never been a writer of lovely sentences.” “He is not a writer whose interest in his characters goes beyond their usefulness as symbolic elements in grand theoretical assemblages.” “He has always fallen short in the presentation of viscerally compelling characters.” To say that a novelist is dazzling, brilliant etc., but that he lacks the ability to construct a plot, create believable characters or to write interesting prose is like saying that you just bought a piano that has gorgeous wood and a beautiful bench but no keys or pedals. It’s like trying to mush together Bach and DNA.

Powers’ touted virtues and his whispered defects have never been more evident than in “The Time of Our Singing.” For one thing, yoking together music, and relativity, and race puts Powers in the difficult position of making the tidiest correlations between his characters and his themes. Since his theme is music’s eternal present, and his characters are musicians, his characters actually are his themes, which makes them hard to believe in as characters. And Powers also has to divide his story up into sections with headings like “December 1964,” followed by sections titled “Summer 1941-Fall 1944,” to show that time is not linear and that everything is, well, relative. So pretty soon characters, themes, and structure become echoes of each other, and the novel becomes the sort of familiar, noisy, claustrophobic tedium -- i.e., everyday life -- you go to a novel to escape from.

But it’s not just that constantly having to draw connections between music, and relativity, and race puts Powers in the position of being less like a novelist imagining a world than a computer scientist writing a program. It’s that, once you step back and start to think about it, there is no connection between those things, even granting Powers the largest poetic license. It’s just another mush-job with the face of erudition. And by now, no educated person -- the kind of person who would pick up Powers’ novel -- needs to be told that we should all learn to live together harmoniously and with the color-blind indifference of time’s warps and woofs.

In fact, so earnest and inflated are Powers’ convoluted attempts to illustrate an obvious ethical point that you begin to suspect Powers’ own sincerity. Consider his vaunted mastery of the musical idiom. He has been praised for his descriptions of classical music, but, in truth, he has committed to the page some of the most unfeeling writing about that art ever to appear in print. The reader encounters “crusts of Chopin” and “snarling Rachmaninoff” when Chopin’s gems are not crusts, and Rachmaninoff’s yearning phrases never snarl. To evoke Schubert’s Die Winterreise, an ineffably heartbreaking song cycle about the fragility of feeling and the shortness of life, Powers comes up with an ingenious metaphor -- mechanical engineering: Jonah “was a relentless mechanical engineer, bridging life’s winter trip, cabling up the starting block with the finish post in a few sweeping suspension swags....” Music is notoriously subjective, but you would not describe Schubert as an engineer, or Chopin as producing “crusts” any more than you would say that Aretha Franklin and Eminem share the same style. Powers is not passionately evoking; he’s sterilely informing.

And it’s not just, as other critics have pointed out, that this novelist lacks skill at character portrayal. It’s that he seems to lack human sympathy in the same way that he lacks feeling for music. His similes are downright ugly. Performing in a duet, Delia finds it her turn to sing: “the ball bounced back to Delia’s court.” David, though he is just as crudely stereotyped as “a secular Jew in love with knowing,” “davened” (the rocking motion when praying for the dead) to jazz and sometimes appears under “a prayer shawl of silence.” And Powers gives his hero, Jonah, a kind of smug, Olympian tone throughout the book. No matter how horrendous what is going on around him, Jonah has a ready quip. But, then, Powers’ mulattoes are superior, flawless beings, devoid of the slightest petty human emotion.

Maybe because not a single person who reviewed this book -- including this reviewer -- was black, no one raised the question: Just how much prejudice did mulattoes, as opposed to dark-skinned blacks, encounter during the pre-Civil Rights era? Powers has created a very privileged family of mostly light-skinned children -- whose black grandfather was a successful medical doctor in Mississippi in the “twenties”! -- to illustrate the daily degradation of racism.

The really tragic casualty of racial prejudice in music was Paul Robeson, who definitely was not mulatto, and whom Powers treats with the same saccharine condescension as all the other black characters in this book. “No one was allowed to touch such a voice,” is how Joseph characterizes Jonah’s indignation over Robeson’s house arrest for Communist sympathies. But most black musicians didn’t think much of Robeson’s voice, disliked his popularization of Negro spirituals because of the negative associations they roused, and deeply resented his fellow traveling. But, like Powers’ other black characters, Robeson has to be gently handled, as though he were a kind of invalid.

One starts to feel that something hypocritical lies underneath Powers’ flagrant expose of a type of hypocrisy that long ago mutated into far subtler forms of racism. The strangest thing of all is that no reviewer (did everyone make it to the end of this humongous book?) mentioned that “The Time of Our Singing” concludes with an exuberantly positive portrayal of Louis Farrakhan’s Million-Man Rally in Washington, which Powers seems to present as a vindication of Anderson’s humiliation by the DAR decades before. (“Tens of millions; whole lifetimes of lives. I’ve never stood in a gathering so large.... The feeling grows, strange and magnificent.”) But of course, Farrakhan alienated large numbers of blacks and whites with his anti-Semitism and his own racist invective; in other words, Farrakhan stands for everything Powers seem to be against.

It’s astonishing how much poison a lot of information, plenty of bit-like connections masquerading as real knowledge, and hundreds of laborious pages can hide.