Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance [Paperback]

Mr Powers begins his novel by following a narrator travelling by train from Chicago to Boston. He has to change trains in Detroit and since he has several hours at his leisure, he decides to visit the Detroit Institute of Arts. There, he is puzzled by a photograph taken by Augustus Sander in 1914 showing three farmers on their way to a dance. The reader follows the narrator's progress as he tries to find answers to the questions that preoccupy him about the photograph: who took it, why was it taken, who are the three farmers appearing in the picture.
On another level, Mr Powers gives a fictional account - or it may also be the result of the narrator's research, it is not explicit in the text - of the action taking place at the time the photograph was taken and also what happens subsequently. And so the reader gets to know the three farmers Hubert, Peter and Adolphe.
Yet on another level, the author introduces various contemporary characters working in the Powell Building for a magazine called "Micro Monthly News": Mays, Moseley, Delaney. After having at first the impression that the events at this level are unrelated to the two other levels, the reader soon realises that there is a connection indeed.
What makes Mr Powers's novel interesting are his many reflections on various topics. These range from the situation of a small Belgian village called Petit Roi during the First World War, the part that Henry Ford played in that war, various personalities like Darwin, Freud, Gödel, Planck or Sarah Bernhardt, to the Industrial Revolution and the changes that mechanisation brought to our civilisation. And because the main protagonist so to speak of the novel is a photograph, Mr Powers also deals in detail in the history of photography.
A very instructive novel, plenty of interesting points of view that show Mr Powers's broad knowledge.

At last I finally got round to reading Richard Powers' debut novel, Three Farmers on their way to a Dance. At the time of publication in 1985 this novel must have arrived from the press as a dazzling and ambitious debut. Having read most of Powers 10 novels, I can clearly see that Three Farmers on their way to a Dance pointed out the direction that this great writer would take. Over the ten novels published thus far, Powers has certainly maintained his ambitious drive, a dazzling display of the use of language and an original and highly imaginative approach to writing.

After all its erudite qualities, its brilliant display of ideas and its enigmatic structure and narration, Three Farmers is at heart a mystery novel. Powers has three story lines running though the novel. He structures the stories as follow: first there is a nameless first person narrator who visits a museum in Detroit and is intrigued by a mural painted by Diego Rivera and commissioned by Esdel Ford. As the narrator leaves the museum he comes across a photograph of three men, the three farmers on their way to a dance. The narrator then doggedly decides to pursue the source and origin of the photograph. In doing so Powers uses this narrator to speculate on and discuss a number of ideas. Secondly, the photograph, set on the dawn of the first world war, is said to be taken in May 1914. The three men in the photograph are Hubert, Peter and Adolphe related to each other. The narrative shifts to the third person and goes back in time to tell the war time stories of the three men. Thirdly, the final story is a contemporary one. Again it takes the form of a third person narration in which the story of Peter Mays is told. Mays works for a news magazine, the Micro Monthly News. One day Mays looks out of his office window and spots a red head woman, he becomes besotted with her and goes off on a trail to discover who she is. This leads to a biography of Sarah Bernhardt as Mays confuses the red head woman for her. Out of all this we get a compendium history of some of the significant events of the first and second decades of the twentieth century. Mays' story eventually connects to the three farmers.

My summary barley encapsulates this rich and complex story. Its complexity leaves one to wonder if Powers was brave or fool hardy to debut with a novel of this order. It raises the question: who did Powers thought his readers would be? He makes great demands upon the reader by writing in the vein of modernism. Along with the fact that Powers uses both first and third person narrators, in passages the novel reads as if Powers wanted to remove the narrators from the story - stretching the notion of the unobtrusive narrator to its limit. Another issue that makes the novel a difficult read is Powers use of language and his style. The text is littered with a broad range of figurative language. Unlike many literary writers, Powers sentences all too often contain metonymy, litotes, synecdoche, etc. There are also some lovely arresting pithy statements: "when we don't know what we are after, we risk passing over it in the dark."

In the main, to use a cliché, Three Farmers is a novel of ideas. Powers picks up and discusses photography, physics, memory, biography and the impact of the first world war on the three farmers. He also takes time out to render a subtle critique of the factory with its assembly line system. Powers writes unashamedly about ideas. I dare say that some readers will find this approach exciting and challenging but not all. However, the ideas in the novel are not just there per se. Powers has the ability to fictionalize them into interesting stories. So an idea about accelerated culture and trigger points is transformed into an intriguing story about the origins of the first world war.

Then almost as if in homage to Proust or at least taking a cue from him, Powers explores the issue of memory. He has the first person narrator, who is becoming obsessed by the photograph of the three farmers, ruminating on the photograph in terms of how it affects his mind in recollecting the images. This is beautifully expressed thus: "I could no longer voluntarily call to mind the subject of the black-and -white image that had moved me so profoundly. Yet I had moments, admittedly more isolated, seemingly spontaneously or brought on by slight associations, when the urgency and clarity of those three farmers, looking over their right shoulders, came back to me with all their old force."

So much for the brilliance of his ideas, but Powers is good enough to have realised that his novel would need a human story. To that effect, he uses the three farmers, Peter Mays' story and a fictionalize account of Henry Ford's effort to intervene in the first world to do so. Unfortunately, for me these story lines are long and over drawn. The reader could easily get bog down in them because of their detail and slow development. I found myself wanting to get back on track with the narrative of ideas.

Three Farmers on their Way to a Dance was a novel that showed a promise of great things to come. Ten novels later, the question must be did Powers live up to the great expectation? The short answer is yes, and with at least of four of his ten novels, The Gold Bug Variations, Galatea 2.2, The Time of our Singing and The Echo Maker, considered to be masterpieces it could be said that he has exceeded the expectation.

Richard Powers is one of the most highly regarded contemporary American novelists, frequently cited alongside David Foster Wallace as a successor to Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo. 'Three Farmers Going To a Dance' is his first novel, published in 1985 and immediately acclaimed as the debut of a significant talent.

'Three Farmers Going To a Dance' showcases what will subsequently be seen to be Powers' characteristic manner. The author weaves together three plots, two contemporary and one historical: a researcher's fascination with a photograph briefly seen in a Detroit museum; a young technical writer's pursuit of a mysterious woman glimpsed from the eighth story of a building; and the lives of three young men from the eve of the First World War to their various fates. In the course of his narrative, Powers investigates the early history of documentary photography, recreates the febrile atmosphere of the naïve months of the beginning of the war, offers a précis of the career of Sandra Bernhardt, and expounds on the unlikely history of Henry Ford's peace mission. The whole is bound together by a conventional mystery plot - there is a romance, and even an unexpected legacy - that deepens into an investigation of the relationship between past, present and future and the role of memory and history.

This is an ambitious novel. Certainly Powers is a clever and serious writer. It is hard to think of a contemporary who is more unashamedly intelligent, or who expects more of the reader in terms of conceptual grasp. He is not an experimentalist in prose: his difficulty stems entirely from the wide range of subject matter he treats, the depth of his exploration and his refusal to acknowledge disciplinary boundaries. He is unusual among writers of literary fiction in having significant training in the sciences and music as well as in literature. No reader is likely to feel that their intelligence is being insulted.

The only downside of Powers' omnivorous intellectual curiosity is a tendency to lecture. There are sections of the book that read like essays - interesting, nonetheless - and the reader with little patience for the details of obscure episodes in history may struggle a little. Powers' conviction that his interest will be matched by the reader's is not always justified. The result is a density of explication that doesn't always fully reward the reader's attention, but this is not a book that can be skimmed. There is also a strong autobiographical element here that sometimes feels inward-looking and narcissistic.

However, 'Three Farmers Going To a Dance' is well worth reading. It's always a pleasure to encounter a writer who doesn't talk down to his readers. This first book achieves more, in my view, than the blockbuster 'Goldbug Variations', and is more substantial in its speculations than the later and more fashionable 'Galatea 2.2'. Later novels by this author show little change in style or gain in formal mastery beyond what is already on display here: if you enjoy this, you may investigate further with confidence.