Classic review: Jazz

"Convinced that he alone remembers those days," Joe, a faithful husband for 20 years, turns to 18-year-old Dorcas, an aspiring beautician who lives with her very strict Aunt Alice.

Poor Alice had tried hard to keep her orphaned niece on the straight and narrow, safe from the temptations of city life. Unlike the narrator and the Traces, who love city life, Alice is alarmed by it. She even hates the sound of jazz: "... she heard a complicated anger in it; something hostile that disguised itself as flourish and roaring seduction. But the part she hated most was its appetite.... It faked happiness, faked welcome, but it did not make her feel generous, this juke joint, barrel hooch, ton k house, music."

The irony is that Alice - and everyone else - thinks of Joe Trace as safe: "A nice, neighborly, everybody-knows-him man. The kind you let in your house because he was not dangerous.... the sort women ran to when they thought they were being followed...." And, as we learn, Joe is the nice man he seems to be: gentle, kind, intending no harm.

As the story unfolds, we come to understand, if not excuse, what happened. The characters themselves cannot excuse their own behavior, which baffles them. Violet is obsessed by the memory of the dead girl whose face she slashed: What was it about her that Joe found so special? She is driven to visit the girl's Aunt Alice, who is understandably frightened. "I'm not the one you need to be scared of," she assures her. "No?" asks Alice. "Who is?" "I don't know," Violet admits. "That's what hurts my head."

Some of the most interesting scenes in the book are the subsequent meetings of these two very different women who come to respect each other, even before they learn to understand each other. "We born around the same time...," Violet tells her. "We women, me and you. Tell me something real. Don't just say I'm grown and ought to know. I don't. I'm fifty and I don't know nothing. What about it? Do I stay with him?"

Violet, Joe, Alice, Dorcas, and the other characters are ordinary, yet highly individualized, people who are brought face to face with serious questions about how to live their lives: the kind of questions it was once fashionable to call "existential."

Morrison handles these profound themes with gravity and a touch of wry humor: There is not the least hint of pretension or portentousness to mar the spontaneous-seeming flow of the (jazz-like!) narrative.

Without further violence or violation, without any miraculous spiritual epiphanies, without even the trimmings of melodrama, the survivors manage to repair their lives, much to the surprise of the nameless narrator, who had not reckoned on the human capacity for regeneration and who now offers us the gift of their poignant, sad, ultimately restorative story.

Merle Rubin was a frequent Monitor book reviewer. 

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