How unbelievably ambitious. Like all Powers's novels, the tone is melancholy, the narrator fallible. The underlying burden, of being black and Jewish at once in the United States from the 1930s on, is not quite as completely painful as the theme of Operation Wandering Soul, but has no comfort other than a gospel hope that it will end someday. I don't think the language is quite as beautiful as that in The Gold Bug Variations, but it doesn't matter, because the singer comes in with Dowland, with Bach, with Palestrina. The weight of the plot is probably a fugue (probably a Mass), with all the repeats and inversions and silences.
ISBN: 0374277826
Much later: The reviews and commentaries I've read mostly describe this as a novel about being black, or of mixed race between black and white. I think this is odd in the context of the novel, which implicitly covers the Holocaust and explicit antiSemitism. It really isn't a novel about either case individually, although it's long enough to develop characters in one case or the other.
The most impressive scene is an argument between two aging men in pain, one black one Jewish, on whose pain is worse; they are both usually too wise to have that argument, they do anyway, it's very painful even to read, and there is no real reconciliation: it's a destructive break within the family. Nor do I think Powers took a side in the argument.
So wrote clew in Fiction (21st c.). | TrackBack