Rating: 
Summary: The beat of the Dance
Review: Toni MOrrison's book Jazz, is amazingly complex. The character Joe Trace, is a person searching for something more in his life. I wonder if maybe he thought he didn't have "the best person," as i he might have thought he could do better. The interesting thing that I found was the narrator. The narrator hides his or her identity until the very end. The identity was left to the reader's imagination, I myself thought that the narrator was Dorcas. When Morrison describes Dorcas's death, she puts the description in the point-of-view of a young lady. Also, when the narrator longs to be with Joe, and she says all she can do is wait. In my opinion, I take that as Dorcas being in heaven, and looking down on Joe. The setting of the story takes place in the early 1900's, in Lenox Avenue. The author sets the story in such a rural place that you wouldn't think anything crime wise would happen. That changes as Joe kills Dorcas. Joe kills Dorcas because at the time he was so happy with her, and others he was so sad. He killed her just to keep the feeling going. Joe shot her, which shocked me in a way because Violet, Joe's wife forgives him. How could Violet forgive him after he had sexual affairs with someone young enough to be their daughter? Also, when Violet is upset about Joe's affair why does she need to know about Dorcas? Is it the thought that Violet wasn't good enough for Joe? This book was relatively good, but confusing at times. To my suprise I learned that Toni Morrison's Jazz was second in a trilogy. If you like a book that is challenging, read Jazz.
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent at points, but very uneven
Review: Toni Morrison's Jazz is like the very little girl with a very little curl, right in the middle of her forehead. When it is good, it is very, very good, and when it is bad, it is horrid.First, where it is good. Jazz tells about a murderous love triangle in 1920's Harlem involving Joe Trace, a middle-aged cosmetics salesman who takes an 18-year old lover, and then to keep the affair from ending, kills her. His wife Violet then seeks revenge on the girl by mutilating her corpse at the funeral, but finally is reconciled to the girl's family and to her husband. A plot about passions, if there ever was one, and Morrison's language certainly evokes those passions. Hers is prose more to be experienced than read. The passages narrating the characters' childhoods and states of mind leading up to their various acts of love and violence makes you understand exactly what experiences in being a Negro in the turn-of-the century south or Jazz Age New York would lead a person to feel the anger and longing that produces the passionate violence this book is about. Her language does not only explain these dark passions, does not only let the reader share them, but actually makes them seem beautiful, in their own inverted sort of way. But in her use of this language, Morrison is not so much an author as a presdigitator. Her lyric prose catches the mood of the characters' actions without actually making them make any sense, and so the excellent style of the novel merely serves as a diversionary tactic to distract one from the fact that the plot is quite weak. Read for emotion, the book does let you feel what the characters feel, but read actually paying attention to the text, there are numerous moments where you can't help but ask, "And the character is doing this why?" or "This symbolic motivation is related to the character's actual actions in what way?" I felt almost cheated at the end when Violet reconciles herself to Joe without even a cursory explanation of what led her violent, hateful, destructive emotions to do a complete about-face in the space of the last twenty pages. Certainly, the final description of their renewed commitment to their love is beautiful, but it is marred in that it makes no sense, and its senselessness makes no sense either. This might be overlooked if Morrison even managed to keep up her lyric conjuring for the entire novel. But it is occasionally interrupted by self-indulgent intrusions wherein a narrative "I" confesses that even the author really doesn't understand the characters. (This does not help the reader in the slightest.) Then there are the extended flashbacks involving minor characters' childhoods in the South that neither advance nor explain the main 1920's Harlem plot, and furthermore destroy the lyric jazz mood of the novel because the jazz style that works so beautfully in the city simply is not appropriate for the rural deep South. Jazz is a good novel to experience the first 50 pages of, to become wrapped up in Morrison's almost magic prose. But it is not worth finishing -- she should have lent her considerable narrative talents to a more worthy plot.
Rating: 
Summary: Rereadable
Review: Toni Morrison's novel "Jazz" features one of the most initially inscrutable narrators in recent history. While the story itself is compelling (and is, according to the author herself, based on an actual Harlem murder circa the 1920's) and the language is liquid, poetic and wholly engrossing, it is, I think, the point of view from which this story is told that will make this particular Morrison work immortal. Is it God telling the tale, or is it, as Morrison herself has also suggested, the simple, oft-unheard inner voice of a universal "me" that can never achieve physical contact, being unembodied? Is it an omniscient neighbour listening in, putting the pieces of the tale together for himself/herself?
"Some people find other people's chaos very inspirational."--Toni Morrison
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