Jazz

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Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller BELOVED (1988) was a hard act to follow, but her new novel, JAZZ, is an adventurous, richly imagined work that extends her range into Afro-American city life.

JAZZ begins with a terse, anecdotal story that seems closely akin to such blues ballads as "Frankie and Johnny." Joe Trace, a door-to-door salesman in his fifties, has a "deepdown, spooky love" for eighteen-year-old Dorcas, but he shoots her when their three-month-old affair goes awry. Joe’s wife Alice then takes a strange revenge by bursting in on Dorcas’ funeral and trying to slash the dead girl’s face.

Playing off this sensational opening story, Morrison’s quirky narrative voice ranges in many directions, much as a jazz musician might improvise on the opening statement of a melody. In a vividly sensuous style, the author brings to life both the excitement of Jazz Age Harlem, where many Afro-Americans migrated after World War I, and the racism, violence, and unresolved mysteries of the places they left behindeither of society or of fate. Rather, she compels the reader to care for Joe, Alice, Corcas, and many other characters by vividly dramatizing both their individual passions and their discoveries of their own unique identities. Ultimately, it is the power of Morrison’s narrator and characters to renew and reinvent themselves—much as a jazz musician plays upon an old melody.

Bibliography

Gates, David. “American Means Black, Too.” Newsweek 119 (April 27, 1992): 66. A review of Jazz that maintains that the novel is not just about the story and characters but also about “the process of its own creation.”

Hulbert, Ann. “Romance and Race.” Review of Jazz, by Toni Morrison. The New Republic 206 (May 18, 1992): 43-48. Hulbert criticizes Jazz as a failed experiment in self-conscious improvisation. She argues that Morrison’s characters are flat and her descriptions clichéd. According to Hulbert, although Morrison intends to avoid romanticizing blackness, she instead ends up sentimentalizing family domesticity.

Jones, Carolyn M. “Traces and Cracks: Identity and Narrative in Toni Morrison’s Jazz.” African American Review 31 (Fall, 1997): 481-495. Jones discusses Jazz in relation to its precursor, Beloved, tracing the theme of healing and reconstructing “cracked” black identity through love. She compares the formation of identity to the improvisation of jazz and concludes that Jazz represents both the ongoing construction of personal identity and the formation of community.

Kubitschek, Missy D. Toni Morrison: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998. Discusses Morrison’s writing in traditions of African American, modernist, and postmodernist American writers. Chapters focus on individual novels, including Jazz, and feature sections on plot and character development, narrative structure, thematic issues, and critical approaches. Ideal for students and general readers.

Leonard, John. “Her Soul’s High Song.” The Nation 254 (May 25, 1992): 706-718. This discussion of Jazz in relation to Morrison’s other novels finds her dominant theme to be “identity-making” in a black culture of broken families and failed dreams. Leonard admires Jazz s wealth of characters, its exploration of their Southern roots, and its witty use of a self-conscious narrator. According to Leonard, Morrison is “the best writer working in America.”

McDowell, Deborah A. “Harlem Nocturne.” The Women’s Review of Books 9 (June, 1992): 1, 3–4. Maintains that Morrison intends to animate “the dry and disconnected bones of the black historical past.” Sees a direct connection between Jazz and Beloved, especially between characters.

Mbalia, Doreatha D. “Women Who Run with Wild: The Need for Sisterhoods in Jazz.Modern American Fiction 39 (Fall/Winter, 1993): 623-646. Mbalia offers a plot and character analysis of Jazz while discussing the theme of shared...

(This entire section contains 842 words.)

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unity of African people as a defense against the racial oppression of blacks. She explores the analogy of jazz music with narrative form and the merger of form and content in Morrison’s novel.

Miller, Jane. “New Romance.” London Review of Books, May 14, 1992, 12. Insists that “Jazz is a love story, indeed a romance” of older women and African American culture.

O’Brien, Edna. “Jazz.” The New York Times Book Review, April 5, 1992, 1, 29–30. Admires the worlds of Harlem and the rural South evoked by Morrison but misses “the emotional nexus” provided by other writers such as William Faulkner and James Joyce in creating their own vivid worlds.

Pereira, Mali W. “Periodizing Toni Morrison’s Work from The Bluest Eye to Jazz: The Importance of Tar Baby.” MELUS 22 (Fall, 1997): 71-82. Focuses on Tar Baby as a transitional novel connecting Morrison’s earlier work with her later books. Offers an in-depth analysis of Jazz, showing how the novel compares with and comments on The Bluest Eye.

Rodrigues, Eusebio, L. “Experiencing Jazz.Modern American Fiction 39 (Fall/Winter, 1993): 733-754. Rodrigues presents a literary analysis of Jazz, focusing on the music symbolism of the novel. He interprets jazz as an analogy for black experience and its literary construction and discusses the literary devices of punctuation and rhythmic use of words.

Rubin, Merle. “Morrison’s Poignant Harlem Novel.” The Christian Science Monitor 84 (April 17, 1992): 13. Claims that the novel “demonstrates once again that [Morrison] is one of the most brilliant and inventive American novelists writing today.” Admires the novel’s musical quality and compelling characters.

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