In 1939 at Marion Anderson's great protest concert in Washington, a German-Jewish emigre physicist and a young black contralto are brought together by concern over a lost child. They eventually marry and have three children, bringing them up in a hot-house atmosphere of music and maths, hoping to raise them to have no awareness of race as an issue in their lives. All three are musically talented, but they cannot be protected from the world for long. Jonah becomes a successful young tenor, but the world of opera can only accept him as a 'brilliant Negro singer'; Joseph, our narrator, becomes a pianist and devotes his talents to the service of his brother's; Ruth turns her back on classical music ('white music') and disappears, on the run with her black husband under suspicion of being a Black Panther. Powers brilliantly and devastatingly delineates the tragedy of race in America, as it unfolds from the Civil Rights movement to Rodney King and Louis Farrakhan, through the lives and choices of one family, caught on the cusp of identities.
This is a hugely ambitious - and brilliantly achieved - novel, as brilliantly clever as Powers' previous novels, but also deeply political and deeply moving.
- ISBN10 043401060X
- ISBN13 9780434010608
- Publish Date 6 March 2003 (first published 1 January 1999)
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 21 February 2007
- Publish Country GB
- Publisher Cornerstone
- Imprint William Heinemann Ltd
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 640
- Language English