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1992-09-10
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REVIEWS, Page 70BOOKSRiffs on Violence
By PAUL GRAY
TITLE: Jazz
AUTHOR: Toni Morrison
PUBLISHER: Knopf; 229 pages; $21
THE BOTTOM LINE: Enchanting voices surround but do not
solve a mystery.
This novel, Toni Morrison's sixth, takes only its first
five sentences to disclose the central plot. Within a few more
pages, most of the details have been provided. The setting is
Harlem, the year 1926. Joe Trace, 50, shoots and kills Dorcas
Manfred, the teenage girl with whom he has been having a
clandestine affair. When Joe's wife Violet, also 50, hears what
has happened, she goes to Dorcas' funeral and takes a butcher
knife to the dead girl's face.
These spasms of violence form the somber theme of Jazz,
but most of the novel consists of riffs and variations.
Different voices materialize, sometimes disembodied, sometimes
belonging to casual onlookers or to the principal characters
themselves. The narrative glides between the present and the
past, to the rural Virginia of the 1880s, where Joe and Violet
met and from which they eventually migrated to the magical place
they call the City.
Many of these interludes are enchanting. Morrison has few
living peers at evoking both the particulars and the
sensuousness of scenes, whether they be the bloom of an
unexpectedly lush cotton crop or the arrival of spring on city
streets: "What can beat bricks warming up in the sun? The return
of awnings. The removal of blankets from horses' backs." Even
her ventures into the mystical come furnished with details: "The
music the world makes, familiar to fishermen and shepherds,
woodsmen have also heard. It hypnotizes mammals. Bucks raise
their heads and gophers freeze."
But for all its local eloquence, Jazz never convincingly
accounts for the horror that Joe and Violet feel compelled to
wreak. That they have suffered -- from white racism, poverty --
is made abundantly clear. Their individual motives for lashing
out as they do are not. Asked directly why he shot Dorcas, Joe
says, "Scared. Didn't know how to love anybody." Asked why she
tried to carve up a dead girl's face, Violet answers, "I don't
know." Great fiction explains the inexplicable. By that
standard, Jazz measures up as very good.