AuntShecky
04-17-2009, 04:38 PM
Review of Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance by Richard Powers (New York: McGraw Hill, 1985.)
Of the century just past as well as the one that has just begun, one can make several sweeping statements. First, through the myriad of media of both print and photography, no other era in history has been so thoroughly and painstakingly recorded, and secondly, from a psychological standpoint, our age can be characterized as increasingly obsessive-compulsive. Both aspects have merged and surged in the proving grounds of technology and under the microscope of science, in which the relatively-young discipline of quantum physics has discovered that some phenomena only exist in the process of being measured and observed, during which they may also change. The convention that the true artist is “ahead of his time,” marks Richard Powers who seems to have illustrated this with his first novel of more than two decades ago. (He may have even presaged the fact that here in 2009, many of us are compulsively dependent on the Internet, the iPod, and cellphones , with this statement in his 1985 book: “Normally, technology creates new goods that create the need for themselves, until in a short time consumers cannot do without a good that did not exist a few years before.”)
Three deceptively-separate narrative threads comprise the book’s structure, which opens with a first-person narrator who, when his journey has stopped for a layover in Detroit, kills some time by visiting a museum, where he discovers a old photograph whose title is Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance. Since the three pair of eyes
staring into the camera seem to pierce the narrator’s soul, an inexplicable force compels him to drop everything in order to learn all that can be learned about the photo, the photographer, and its three unlikely subjects. The second thread narrates the lives of the Hubert, Adolphe, and Peter, apparently related by blood (though parentage in Europe in the early twentieth century was as sketchy as nationalities, with the boundaries of countries frustratingly vague in the pre-World War I era.) Sander, the photographer, obsessed with making a comprehensive history of the common man composed solely of unstaged photos, enlists for subjects these three boys,
dressed in their Sunday best on a muddy road in the Westerwald on May 1, 1914. Their destination is both a literal “dance” as well as the metaphoric danse macabre of the First World War. We see the various roles the three play in that arena, two of them more directly affected by the battles than the third who almost unwittingly becomes a war correspondent through a devious identity-switch. The third part of the narrative is contemporary (circa 1985) and concerns a writer, Peter Mays, who works for a computer magazine. Mays has his own kind of OCD; looking out the window of his high-rise office, he spots a redheaded clarinetist marching in a Veterans’ Day parade, and from that point he dedicates his life to finding out who this girl is and what she signifies. Added to the mix are several real-life historical figures of the early 20th century, the aforementioned Sander, the actress Sarah Bernhardt, and the highly-significant presence of Henry Ford.
As can be predicted, all three seemingly-disparate narrative threads converge, though in most unpredictable ways. For instance, at various points the reader is led to believe that the first-person narrator and Peter Mays are one and the same, but there are just as many incidences to prove that the two characters are separate entities.
Additionally, there are certain mix-and-match aspects of the three farmers, yet each character is undeniably unique. Such sly literary sleight-of-hand manifests Richard Powers’ special skills or “powers,” if you will. This changeable aspect within the novel proves the author’s point that any work of art, such as a photo, is the result of a mutual effort between the artist and the viewer; again, the object observed changes with the observer. Power’s tells us, “History is the army of occupation and we are all collaborators.”
Since his first novel, Powers has received literary acclaim for several novels. A new one will be published in November 2009; his latest, The Echo Maker, won the National Book Award. Reviewing that work for a 2006 issue of The New York Review of Books, Margaret Atwood concurred with the LA Times description of Powers as “a novelist of ideas and a novelist of witness.” Margaret Atwood also decried the fact that while Powers has been rightly been well-received by critics, the reading public has yet to embrace him with the popularity he most certainly deserves. (Her statement infused me with guilt – my paperback copy of Three Farmers had gathered dust on a bookshelf for years after I had purchased it at a now-defunct discount drugstore for $1.99, until I finally, I’m ashamed to admit, read it only recently. If I had but known that this, as well as his subsequent novels, were so stunningly good, I would have read them much earlier.)
Margaret Atwood continues, “Powers jams wildly disparate elements together in a kind of atomic-bomb-manner–what he wants is fission, then fusion, and a big bang at the end.” Powers is an explosive talent, indeed, for Three Farmers on their Way to a Dance is like a nuclear reactor. All manner of quanta bubble, dart, and change
beneath the surface of his witty narrative style, which is not exactly surrealistic, not quite magic realism, but a highly conscious state of hyper-realism – a “hypertext” to be sure. With no contradiction, I can say this novelist is also down-to-earth, beautifully subscribing to E.M. Forster’s dictum that a novel should “tell a good story.” Forster also famously said of a novel’s plot: “Only connect.” Three Farmers on their Way to a Dance makes delightful and emotionally resonant connections, which certainly connect with this reader, albeit –and alas - belatedly.
Of the century just past as well as the one that has just begun, one can make several sweeping statements. First, through the myriad of media of both print and photography, no other era in history has been so thoroughly and painstakingly recorded, and secondly, from a psychological standpoint, our age can be characterized as increasingly obsessive-compulsive. Both aspects have merged and surged in the proving grounds of technology and under the microscope of science, in which the relatively-young discipline of quantum physics has discovered that some phenomena only exist in the process of being measured and observed, during which they may also change. The convention that the true artist is “ahead of his time,” marks Richard Powers who seems to have illustrated this with his first novel of more than two decades ago. (He may have even presaged the fact that here in 2009, many of us are compulsively dependent on the Internet, the iPod, and cellphones , with this statement in his 1985 book: “Normally, technology creates new goods that create the need for themselves, until in a short time consumers cannot do without a good that did not exist a few years before.”)
Three deceptively-separate narrative threads comprise the book’s structure, which opens with a first-person narrator who, when his journey has stopped for a layover in Detroit, kills some time by visiting a museum, where he discovers a old photograph whose title is Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance. Since the three pair of eyes
staring into the camera seem to pierce the narrator’s soul, an inexplicable force compels him to drop everything in order to learn all that can be learned about the photo, the photographer, and its three unlikely subjects. The second thread narrates the lives of the Hubert, Adolphe, and Peter, apparently related by blood (though parentage in Europe in the early twentieth century was as sketchy as nationalities, with the boundaries of countries frustratingly vague in the pre-World War I era.) Sander, the photographer, obsessed with making a comprehensive history of the common man composed solely of unstaged photos, enlists for subjects these three boys,
dressed in their Sunday best on a muddy road in the Westerwald on May 1, 1914. Their destination is both a literal “dance” as well as the metaphoric danse macabre of the First World War. We see the various roles the three play in that arena, two of them more directly affected by the battles than the third who almost unwittingly becomes a war correspondent through a devious identity-switch. The third part of the narrative is contemporary (circa 1985) and concerns a writer, Peter Mays, who works for a computer magazine. Mays has his own kind of OCD; looking out the window of his high-rise office, he spots a redheaded clarinetist marching in a Veterans’ Day parade, and from that point he dedicates his life to finding out who this girl is and what she signifies. Added to the mix are several real-life historical figures of the early 20th century, the aforementioned Sander, the actress Sarah Bernhardt, and the highly-significant presence of Henry Ford.
As can be predicted, all three seemingly-disparate narrative threads converge, though in most unpredictable ways. For instance, at various points the reader is led to believe that the first-person narrator and Peter Mays are one and the same, but there are just as many incidences to prove that the two characters are separate entities.
Additionally, there are certain mix-and-match aspects of the three farmers, yet each character is undeniably unique. Such sly literary sleight-of-hand manifests Richard Powers’ special skills or “powers,” if you will. This changeable aspect within the novel proves the author’s point that any work of art, such as a photo, is the result of a mutual effort between the artist and the viewer; again, the object observed changes with the observer. Power’s tells us, “History is the army of occupation and we are all collaborators.”
Since his first novel, Powers has received literary acclaim for several novels. A new one will be published in November 2009; his latest, The Echo Maker, won the National Book Award. Reviewing that work for a 2006 issue of The New York Review of Books, Margaret Atwood concurred with the LA Times description of Powers as “a novelist of ideas and a novelist of witness.” Margaret Atwood also decried the fact that while Powers has been rightly been well-received by critics, the reading public has yet to embrace him with the popularity he most certainly deserves. (Her statement infused me with guilt – my paperback copy of Three Farmers had gathered dust on a bookshelf for years after I had purchased it at a now-defunct discount drugstore for $1.99, until I finally, I’m ashamed to admit, read it only recently. If I had but known that this, as well as his subsequent novels, were so stunningly good, I would have read them much earlier.)
Margaret Atwood continues, “Powers jams wildly disparate elements together in a kind of atomic-bomb-manner–what he wants is fission, then fusion, and a big bang at the end.” Powers is an explosive talent, indeed, for Three Farmers on their Way to a Dance is like a nuclear reactor. All manner of quanta bubble, dart, and change
beneath the surface of his witty narrative style, which is not exactly surrealistic, not quite magic realism, but a highly conscious state of hyper-realism – a “hypertext” to be sure. With no contradiction, I can say this novelist is also down-to-earth, beautifully subscribing to E.M. Forster’s dictum that a novel should “tell a good story.” Forster also famously said of a novel’s plot: “Only connect.” Three Farmers on their Way to a Dance makes delightful and emotionally resonant connections, which certainly connect with this reader, albeit –and alas - belatedly.