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Jazz (Beloved Trilogy, #2)

Toni Morrison

Start date: July 1, 2021

Finish date: July 19, 2021

Discussion: Author's Pick

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Oct 10, 2022 Jeanne rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: classics, read-2022, read-women, african-african-american

Sth, I know that woman. She used to live with a flock of birds on Lenox Avenue. Know her husband, too. He fell for an eighteen-year-old girl with one of those deepdown, spooky loves that made him so sad and happy he shot her just to keep the feeling going. When the woman, her name is Violet, went to the funeral to see the girl and to cut her dead face they threw her to the floor and out of the church. She ran, then, through all that snow, and when she got back to her apartment she took the birds

Sth, I know that woman. She used to live with a flock of birds on Lenox Avenue. Know her husband, too. He fell for an eighteen-year-old girl with one of those deepdown, spooky loves that made him so sad and happy he shot her just to keep the feeling going. When the woman, her name is Violet, went to the funeral to see the girl and to cut her dead face they threw her to the floor and out of the church. She ran, then, through all that snow, and when she got back to her apartment she took the birds from their cages and set them out the windows to freeze or fly, including the parrot that said, “I love you.” (pp. 3-4)

Jazz begins by telling you its story – the woman, her husband, the girl, the parrot – but no spoilers here, as the narrator is as confused about their motivations as everyone else.

"Why did he do such a thing?”

“Why did she?”

“Why did you?”

“I don’t know.” (p. 81).

Toni Morrison spins her story from one character to another and across time. This is not a linear narrative, but a rabbit hole – a glorious rabbit hole – with different narrators telling different pieces of their stories. She leaves us (me) wanting more, especially about Wild, Hunters Hunter, and Golden, but we don't need their whole stories, just the parts that help us understand, "Why did he/she/you do such a thing?”

Their story – Joe, Violet, and Dorcas – is not flat and static, but changes across time. (Are you the same person you were 25 years ago?) Joe and Violet train-danced into the city 20 years ago and, although they were now still a couple, they were "barely still speaking to each other, let alone laughing together or acting like the ground was a dance-hall floor" (p. 36). (view spoiler)

Early on, Joe is just some pitiful old guy (maybe 53), but later Felice observed, "He has double eyes. Each one a different color. A sad one that lets you look inside him, and a clear one that looks inside you. I like when he looks at me.… I think he likes women, and I don’t know anybody like that. I don’t mean he flirts with them, I mean he likes them without that (view spoiler)" (p. 206).

What do I love about Jazz? The music that "bends, falls to its knees to embrace them all, encourage them all to live a little, why don’t you? since this is the it you’ve been looking for" (p. 188). That music swirls throughout the book. Morrison should have included a Spotify channel for reading this book (Okay, Jazz was published before Spotify…) I love the way that the storyline bends, the ways that their narratives shift in the telling, that no one has the whole story (still). I like the alinearity of this book and its recognition that there is more than one truth and that truth changes. There are betrayals, but I like that "enemies" can sit and become friends. I liked that I had to work to follow the narrative (and that I did).

And I like that Morrison's characters were not under her thumb and refused to listen to her directions:

I ought to get out of this place. Avoid the window; leave the hole I cut through the door to get in lives instead of having one of my own…. I thought I knew them and wasn’t worried that they didn’t really know about me. Now it’s clear why they contradicted me at every turn: they knew me all along. Out of the corners of their eyes they watched me. And when I was feeling most invisible, being tight-lipped, silent and unobservable, they were whispering about me to each other. They knew how little I could be counted on; how poorly, how shabbily my know-it-all self covered helplessness. That when I invented stories about them—and doing it seemed to me so fine—I was completely in their hands, managed without mercy (p. 220)

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