Book Of The Month: Jazz
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Jazz:is a most aptly named novel. It runs smoothly and musically like its namesake, a collage of ideas and symphony of scenes. Written by celebrated author, Toni Morrison, Jazz is one of her most popular and artistic works of literature.
Jazz is less of a story and more of an artistic portrayal of a story—like looking at a novel through colored lenses. Toni Morrison imaginatively and spectacularly gazes in on the brutal events of a passionate affair; one that entails obsession, murder, betrayal, and reconciliation.
But the power of this book does not lie in the plot; it lies in the jazz-like, relentlessly challenging and inquisitive manner in which she weaves people together. All the while, she is examining the many twisted, hurtful, and beautiful complexities that make up a human—full of light and full of darkness.
Jazz
Originally Published: 1992
Pages: 256
Available on: Kindle, Paperback, Hardcover, Audiobook
GET YOUR COPY HERE
““Whatever happens, whether you get rich or stay poor, ruin your health or live to old age, you always end up back where you started: hungry for the one thing everybody loses - young loving.””
Set in Harlem, New York City, in the roaring 1920s, Jazz begins with a startling and violent introduction that commands your immediate interest. Violet, an enraged and betrayed wife, crashes a funeral and attacks the corpse of the girl with whom her husband, Joe, not only had a secret affair, but also shot dead. Violet is dragged out unceremoniously—while the dead girl’s murderer, her husband, grieves openly at home, crying over the girl that he killed himself and getting away with the crime.
In a time where the future was finally looking bright and encouraging for Black Americans, Joe and Violet Trace had moved to the City to start a new life, breaking free from their generational ties to slavery, impoverishment, and suppression. Joe becomes an amiable, unassuming salesman that everyone trusts and Violet a respected (if odd) hairdresser in many ladies’ homes. Somewhere along the line, Joe and Violet lose touch with one another; Joe becomes fleetingly involved with a girl half of his age, Dorcus, and the events that follow her death are just as shocking as those that lead to it.
““I was so sure it would happen. That the past was an abused record with no choice but to repeat itself at the crack and no power on earth could lift the arm that held the needle.””
Even after adultery, betrayal, murder, and attempted disfigurement of a corpse, Joe and Violet still find a way to live together; they both obsesses over Dorcus’ memory; Violet strangely befriends Dorcus’ stern aunt; and the couple befriends Dorcus’ very best friend, who held the dying girl in her arms as she bled out all night. The amount of surprising forgiveness, condemnation, and violence will keep a reader hanging on, wondering at why and how these people act and react.
Jazz does not cooperate with the traditional timeline of a novel’s plot. Morrison informs readers in the very first chapter of the major events of the novel, and spends the rest of the book giving readers unpredictable and astonishing insights into these events, of the little pieces that make the whole. Morrison goes back and forth in time, in narrative perspective, in setting, in intention. Readers are swept into the musical flow of various accompaniments being created and lived out separately to eventually run together into one musical movement.
“ “This is the it you’ve been looking for.” ”
This complex and segmented novel creatively dives into each character’s past and perspective, giving the reader insight into what events shaped, smoothed, and scarred each of the characters into who they were at the present moment of the novel.
Jazz is also broken up with beautiful passages on the nature of NYC, just nicknamed the City, including her famous lines:
“I’m crazy about this City.
Daylight slants like a razor cutting the buildings in half. In the top half I see looking faces and it’s not easy to tell which are people, which the work of stonemasons. Below is shadow where any blasé thing takes place: clarinets and lovemaking, fists and the voices of sorrowful women. A city like this one makes me dream tall and feel in on things. Hep. It’s the bright steel rocking above the shade below that does it. When I look over strips of green grass lining the river, at church steeples and into the cream-and-copper halls of apartment buildings, I’m strong. Alone, yes, but top-notch and indestructible-like the City in 1926 when all the wars are over and there will never be another one. The people down there in the shadow are happy about that. At last, at last, everything’s ahead. The smart ones say so and people listening to them and reading what they write down agree: Here comes the new. Look out.”
With many artistic liberties, Morrison uses Jazz as a playground to explore and wonder at the complexities of human natures and relationships, of the blurred lines and similarities between love and hatred, country and city, man and woman, black and white, lust and adultery, vice and virtue, judgment and forgiveness.
Morrison’s golden tongue has never been more evident than in Jazz. Her hard-hitting honesty showcases all the grace and compassion that human nature needs when being examined so closely and deeply as she does. She blames, then forgives; judges and censures, then unshelves and explains. There is always more behind the curtain; more understanding after a little more probing.
““When they fall in love with a city it is for forever. As though there never was a time when they didn’t love it. The minute they arrive at the train station or get off the ferry and glimpse the wide streets and the wasteful lamps lighting them, they know they are born for it. There, in a city, they are not so much new as themselves, their stronger, riskier selves. And in the beginning when they first arrive, and twenty years later when they and the city have grown up, they love that part of themselves so much they forget what loving other people was like - if they ever knew, that is.””
Jazz is full of humble wonder and questioning, not just grand sweeping statements of broad truths. Morrison, and her narrator, have so many questions about the different parts of humanity and the ultimate putting together of so many different puzzle pieces. How does it all come together? This work is incredibly humanizing and humbling; readers fall in love with her prose, her wonderful wondering, and her mastery of language.
Morrison’s inspiration for the title was the “the modernity that jazz anticipated and directed, and … its unreasonable optimism… Whatever the truth or consequences of individual entanglements and the racial landscape, the music insisted that the past might haunt us, but it would not entrap us.”
Published in 1992, Jazz is one of Toni Morrison’s most stunning works. Morrison received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993, and was the very first Black woman to do so. She is also the author of renowned books Beloved and The Bluest Eye, and has been awarded many literary distinctions, including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
More by Toni Morrison:
Toni Morrison
Beloved
Toni Morrison
The Bluest Eye
If you do decide to read this book, or maybe need some more encouragement, take a look at this New York Times article on Morrison's writing of Jazz. If you enjoy this book, you should give her other famous works a read, and try selections such as Meridian by Alice Walker, or I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou.