SOURCE: A review of Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance, in Prairie Schooner, Vol. 60, No. 1, Spring, 1986, p. 108.

Morris is an American writer, editor, educator, and critic whose works include A World of Order and Light: The Fiction of John Gardner (1984). In the following review, he discusses the structure of the three narratives within Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance.

With his first published novel, Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance, Richard Powers manages both a technical and an intellectual achievement. The novel is a triple narrative, three stories linked superficially by a photograph: a portrait of three young Prussians on their way to a country dance. But this surface-level link dives far deeper, establishing a profound connection among the three stories, the photo passing through hands and through time to become a symbol of this "tortured century." One narrative (a triple narrative...