Jazz

Jazz

Morrison's most recent novel, Jazz isn't advertised as such, but it is meant to follow Beloved as the second volume of a projected trilogy. This fact may surprise those readers who aren't current with Morrison's ambitions, because Jazz doesn't extend the story told in Beloved in a conventional way. The characters are new, and so is the location. Even the narrative approach is different. However, in terms of chronology, Jazz does pick up roughly where Beloved left off and continues the greater story Morrison wishes to tell in her trilogy in progress, the story of her people passing through their American experience, from the days of slavery up to the present.

Jazz, the second in Morrison's suite of novels about black life from the 1800s to the present, continues many themes set out in Beloved: the individual's struggle to establish and sustain a personal identity, the clash between individual interests and community interests, and which takes priority. "Here," says Andrea Stuart, "the desire for individuation and rebirth collides with another of the author's favorite themes: the futility, even the danger, of jettisoning one's history." As Morrison noted in her PBS interview, the question, Who is the beloved? also repeats itself. The answer in Jazz has to do with "real passion," Morrison said, "the sort of thing where you say, 'I can't live without you,' and you really mean it. "The inspiration came from a photo of a young girl in a coffin by the Harlem Renaissance photographer James VanderZee. Her boyfriend had shot her, and she kept his identity secret so that he could escape. Morrison explained, "And I thought, now if that isn't the most romantic teenage passion! And to put it right in the jazz age, which is full of passion, romance, music, license--you know, black people in the city, empowered now.... I wanted the book to really be about the people who didn't know they were living in an era."

Jazz is about a middle-aged couple--Joe Trace, waiter and door-to-door cosmetics salesman, and his wife, Violet, a home hairdresser--who migrated to Harlem from the rural South in the early 1900s. As background, Morrison offers some scenes of the brutal Virginia country life blacks endured as sharecroppers at the end of the nineteenth century. By contrast, Joe and Violet are initially dazzled by the prospect of life in New York. But novelist Edna O'Brien's critique in the New York Times Book Review describes the main characters as "people enthralled, then deceived by 'the music the world makes.'" Reality sets in.

Despite Joe's attachment to Violet, he falls in love with Dorcas, who is a teenager, then kills her when she tries to leave him. No one wants to turn Joe in. At the funeral parlor, Violet attempts to slash Dorcas's face but is thrown out, running home and freeing her treasured birds. Later she establishes a relationship with Dorcas's aunt. Critic Richard Eder of the Los Angeles Times Book Review notes the grief and humor of the story, writing that Jazz "could have been either a tragedy or a melodrama with appropriate climactic endings. But Morrison has written a book that ruminates and discourses, ... that follows its riffs through pain and celebration,... that is, in her word, jazz." In Chicago Tribune Books, acclaimed author Michael Dorris calls it a "brilliant, daring new novel" and observes that Jazz "is much more than 'story.' ... It is the blues song of people who understand suffering and survival."

From "Toni Morrison," Contemporary Authors, Gale Research, 1993.

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