HARMONIC CONVERGENCE.("The Time of Our Singing" )(Critical Essay)

In some artists--James Merrill and Milan Kundera, for instance--the inborn human structure-making impulse heats to fever, yielding works that reflect intense private struggles for equilibrium. Among our younger novelists, no one better exemplifies this than Richard Powers. Powers, at forty-five, is the author of eight novels, each as different as can be from its successor but driven by a similar patterning urge: the plot complications generate systems of theme and variation--not as playful as Kundera's, but no less ingenious.

Powers's formalism is most obvious in "The Gold Bug Variations" (1991), his third novel, which took pattern-making itself as its subject, using the obsessions of its central characters to play the intricacies of molecular biology against the architectonics of Baroque music. If somewhat emotionally arid, the novel was brawny with ambition, auguring more honors and prizes for Powers, already a MacArthur Fellow.

Subsequent novels have taken up anomalies of illness and storytelling ("Operation Wandering Soul"), artificial intelligence ("Galatea 2.2"), corporate accountability ("Gain"), and, in "Plowing the Dark," the premises of virtuality. Now, in "The Time of Our Singing" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $27), Powers continues his inventory of the salient themes of late-modern life, addressing a topic that has so far resisted most contemporary novelists, and certainly most contemporary white novelists: race.

Working in his preferred contrapuntal mode--shifting between characters and time periods as well as themes--Powers unfolds the saga of two generations of the musical, intellectual, mixed-race Strom family. The father, David, a European-born Jew who has lost his entire family to the Holocaust, is a theoretical physicist working on problems of time. The mother, Delia, is black, the daughter of a proud and gruffly outspoken Philadelphia physician, who early casts a skeptical eye on her aspirations to become the next Marian Anderson. Alas, she never does. On Easter Sunday of 1939, she meets David on the Mall in Washington (she has gone to hear her idol sing) and, against her own better judgment, falls in love. As they marry and start a family, Delia's musical strivings are taken up by her sons, Jonah, who is blessed with a perfect voice, and Joseph, a more than capable pianist. Their younger sister, Ruth, resists the call of her own talent. The Stroms, devoting themselves to the gifts of their children, dream of rearing them free of the scourges of race. For David, caught in the toils of the theoretical, "race is only real if you freeze time. . . . We all move along a curve that will break down and rebuild us all." The family lives toward a future that has left the issue of race behind; it tries to live as if. But though the world of classical music, like that of science, is relatively color-blind, it is not the world.

"The Time of Our Singing" is a heady, panoramic novel, scored, like so much of Powers's work, for full orchestra. The central story, narrated by Joseph, maps the career of his prodigy brother, recounting Jonah's artistic progress from the time of his stunning debut, in 1961, at a national competition in North Carolina--he is twenty--through various performing and recording triumphs (with Joseph for many years his accompanist). It concludes with his death from an injury received in the post-Rodney King verdict rioting in Oakland, a bitter but possibly fitting irony, as most of Jonah's life was lived at the purest "artistic" remove from the catastrophes of race. Powers offers us scenes and bulletins of the civil-rights struggle, ...