Jazz
It is winter, barely three days into 1926, seven years after Armistice; we are in the scintillating City, around Lenox Avenue, "when all the wars are over and there will never be another one... At last, at last, everything's ahead... Here comes the new. Look out. There goes the sad stuff. The bad stuff. The things-nobody-could-help stuff." But amid the euphoric decisiveness, a tragedy ensues among people who had train-danced into the City, from points south and west, in search of promise. Joe Trace--in his fifties, door-to-door salesman of Cleopatra beauty products, erstwhile devoted husband--shoots to death his lover of three months, impetuous, eighteen-year-old Dorcas ("Everything was like a picture show to her"). At the funeral, his determined, hard-working wife, Violet, herself a hairdresser--who is given to stumbling into dark mental cracks, and who talks mostly to birds--tries with a knife to disfigure the corpse. In a dazzling act of jazz-like improvisation, moving seamlessly in and out of past, present, and future, a mysterious voice--whose identity is a matter of each reader's imagination--weaves this brilliant fiction, at the same time showing how its blues are info
Where Jazz keeps showing up
One of our editors' lists features this novel.
Also by Toni Morrison
What you might want to know about Jazz
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
In 1926 Harlem, an aging door-to-door salesman shoots his teenage lover, and his wife shows up at the funeral with a knife. The novel circles back through their Virginia past to find out how they got here.
Yes. Jazz (1992) is the second book in Toni Morrison's loose Beloved trilogy, between Beloved (1987) and Paradise (1997). The three novels share thematic concerns about Black American history but stand as independent works.
Jazz uses an experimental jazz-inflected narrative voice that improvises across perspectives and time. Most readers find Beloved more demanding; Jazz is structurally challenging but stylistically warmer.
Jazz was written by Toni Morrison, published in 1992 by AWB.
Jazz is 240 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Jazz takes most readers 4 to 5 hours to finish.
Jazz is a standalone novel by Toni Morrison, not part of a series.
Jazz is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
