Classics Corner: Jazz by Toni Morrison; A Book That Sounds As Good As It Reads

Classics Corner: Jazz by Toni Morrison; A Book That Sounds As Good As It Reads




By Julie Sara Porter

Bookworm Reviews




Spoilers: If ever a book needed a soundtrack, it would be Toni Morrison's Jazz.

The book not only pays tribute to the freestyle music in the title but in the narrative as well. Characters call and respond to each other by telling the same events from different points of view, repeat phrases like a chorus, and the paragraphs read almost like a musical vibe. For example:

“Crumpled over, shoulders shaking Violet thought about how she must have looked at the funeral at what her mission was. The sight of herself trying to do something bluesy, something hep, fumbling the knife too late away…She laughed til she coughed and Alice had to make them both a cup of setting tea.

Committed as Violet was to hip development even she couldn't drink the remaining malt- watery, warm, and flat tasting. She buttoned her coat and left the drugstore unnoticed at the same moment as that Violet did, that it was spring. In the City.”

You can just hear the accompanying saxophone, guitar, and drums in the background. Feel free to snap your fingers and tap your toes if you like.

The book's narration is excellent but so is the rest of the book. In many of Morrison's other works like Sula and my favorite of her novels, Beloved, she gives us memorable characters caught up in the social issues of their day like slavery, racism, violence, and frictions within friends and family. Morrison does the same with Jazz.

Morrison provides the book with three characters, three sides of a love triangle that are caught in the struggles of unhappy marriages and the power plays between men and women in a relationship.
The three characters: hair stylist, Violet Trace, her husband, Joe, a cosmetics salesman, and his 18-year-old mistress, Dorcas are compelling as they navigate their relationship with each other during the affair and the violent end in which Joe not only shoots and kills Dorcas, but Violet disfigures her at her funeral.

It's a bizarre triangle with an even stranger resolution but none of the three characters are portrayed as long-suffering victims or a negative stereotypes. Instead they are fully developed. They may be self-centered and even violent and dangerous at times, but the reasons for their behaviors are clear. Like a good jazz song, the second verses explain their pasts and contribute to the first verse about the affair and it's graphic end.

Violet is probably the one who gets the Reader’s sympathy the most but even she has her issues. She is a 50ish married woman who settled into City life with a husband with whom she constantly argues and maintains a silent existence. She is capable of great compassion such as caring for her pet birds including one that says, “ I love you” and she bonds with many of her clients including developing a friendship peculiarly enough with Dorcas's aunt after her death.

However Violet also has difficulties in her past such as her mother's suicide and a troubled relationship with her grandmother whose stories of caring for her former white mistress and her mixed race son seek only to confuse Violet rather than uplift her.

Violet is deeply troubled and at times seems to verge on the edge of sanity.

The possibilities of mental illness comes into focus into Violet's adult life when she suffers three miscarriages and exhibits odd behavior like sitting in the street for hours on end, growing attached to her birds, and at one point contemplating kidnapping a child. Knowing about her past and her emerging psychological issues allows the Reader realize that her behavior was a long time coming and to learn that it was a matter of when not if she would attack and earn her nickname, “Violent.”

Joe's story is just as traumatic and just as understandable as his wife's. We learn that he was abandoned by his parents at a young age and he chose his surname Trace because his adopted parents told him that his birth parents disappeared “without a trace”. He figures that he was the “trace (his) parents left without.” When he finally meets the woman that he suspects may have given birth to him, this meeting provides neither comfort nor resolution as she is a disheveled mentally unstable recluse nicknamed “Wild.”

Joe spends most of his life feeling rootless and while he settles into married life with Violet, it is still fraught with problems. Besides the aforementioned miscarriages and years of silence, the two frequently moved until they were drawn to the allure of the City. (Never named but implied to be Harlem.)

The confusion and aimlessness of Joe's early life and continues into his adult life to the point where one of the first things that he does after meeting Dorcas is compare notes about their parentless past suggesting that Joe wasn't just looking for a lover, he was looking for a kindred spirit.

Dorcas is also brilliantly realized according to Morrison's excellent writing. She is the character who is most influenced by the music of the title and it shows. She begins as an innocent quiet daughter of two parents who were killed in a race riot in East St. Louis, Illinois.

When she moves in with her Puritanical aunt, Alice, Dorcas longs to break free from her aunt's rigidity and gain some independence in her life. She and her new friend, Felice then sneak out to jazz clubs and enjoy the flapper lifestyle. It is at one of these clubs, where Dorcas meets Joe and their affair begins. Dorcas finds Joe's casual demeanor a sharp contrast to her excitable nature as a man who is smooth, kind, and can calm her down.

Dorcas is like many other young people in literature and culture and real life. She wants to experience a life of her own and all that comes with it. Her relationship with Joe brings her excitement but even she knows it won't last. (Hence why she gets involved with another man, Acton, before her death.)

Violet, Joe, and Dorcas's story is like many a sad song about love gone awry. Their paths seemed fated, the lives hard, and the end inevitable. But it is Toni Morrison's ability to capture her tritagonists that make this a song worth hearing again and again.