SOURCE: "Verbing a Noun," in London Review of Books, Vol. 10, No. 6, March 17, 1988, pp. 17-18.

Parrinder is an English critic and educator who has written numerous works on H. G. Wells and science fiction. In the following excerpt, he offers a mixed assessment of Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance, which he calls "a carnivalesque, Post-Modernist historical novel."

In 1910 the German photographer August Sander began work on a never-to-be-completed ethnographic project which he called Man of the 20th Century. This grandiose scheme provides one of the sources of Richard Powers's first novel. The title, Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance, refers to a photograph of young men in felt hats and starched collars walking along a country road, which Sander took in May 1914…. [Powers is a novelist who] is burdened by history, and for whom the central theme of modern life is our own historical...