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Audiobook Summary and Review by StoryShots
A physicist father tells his sons that now is nothing but a very clever lie.
Raise your children beyond race, a mixed couple decides in 1939, and watch history refuse the offer.
That is the wager at the center of The Time of Our Singing, a novel about a mixed-race family, by Richard Powers.
It asks whether music can ever really be a country with no color.
Most people assume classical music is neutral ground, a place where a voice matters more than a face.
David Strom, a German Jewish physicist, and Delia Daley, a Black singer from Philadelphia, meet at Marian Anderson's 1939 concert on the Washington Mall and build their marriage on that belief.
They train their son Jonah as a tenor and raise all three children to live beyond time, beyond identity.
Reviewers still call Jonah one of the finest Negro recitalists the country has produced.
The label finds him anyway.
You can build a family on a beautiful idea and still watch the world outside refuse to honor it.
The parents' dream doesn't die all at once.
It splits three ways, into three children who each answer the same impossible question differently.
Jonah chases the purity of the concert hall.
Ruth rejects it entirely and joins the Black Panthers.
Joseph, the narrator and the family's pianist, sits between them, accompanying his brother while watching his sister disappear.
The novel's structure mirrors this fracture: chapters loop backward and forward across decades, because David Strom, a physicist obsessed with relativity, insists that past and future are folded into every single now.
Race trumps family, one character says.
It's bigger than husband and wife, bigger than brother and sister.
You inherit your family's unfinished arguments whether you asked for them or not, and you spend your life re-fighting the ones you cannot even remember starting.
That non-linear structure is not just a literary trick.
It is the mechanism the book uses to answer the question Ruth's rebellion raises.
Musicians talk about bliss to keep outsiders off the scent.
There is no bliss.
There is only control.
That line reframes the entire family's tragedy.
The Stroms did not fail because they loved music too little.
They failed because they mistook mastery for liberation, drilling scales and arias as though discipline could out-sing four hundred years of American history.
Jonah dies from injuries sustained in the 1992 Los Angeles riots, a death that lands with brutal irony for a man who spent his life trying to stand outside the very history that killed him.
The question the novel leaves open is what happens to the son who is left, Ruth's boy Robert, born into a mixed family in a country still sorting people by shade.
If this story of a family trying to out-sing history stays with you, someone you know would probably want to hear it too.
This summary of The Time of Our Singing traces how one family's faith in music collided with race, time, and history, and how that collision split three siblings into three separate lives.
What we have not unpacked yet is how Powers structures the entire novel around David Strom's theories of non-linear time, or how events like the Emmett Till murder and the March on Washington are woven directly into the family's private story.
Readers drawn to novels about identity, mixed families, and the cost of believing art can outrun history will find this one unforgettable.
We're putting together the full summary of The Time of Our Singing right now, with an infographic and animated video.
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