Violet and Joe are country folk who come to grief not so much because Joe falls in love with a young girl, but because they both fall in love with the streets and cellars and rooftops where jazz whispers its temptations. Jazz is in cahoots with the City, its accomplice. “Come and do wrong.”’ Alice futilely closes the windows against the danger. The story is set in New York in the 1920s, where Alice, Dorcas’s puritanical aunt and guardian, ‘had worked hard to privatize her niece, but she was no match for a City seeping music that begged and challenged each and every day. It is as palpable as its human protagonists, Violet and her erring husband, Joe, who loved eighteen-year-old Dorcas ‘with one of those deepdown, spooky loves that made him so sad and happy he shot her just to keep the feeling going’. Jazz not only inspires the form of the book, it is also one of the central characters. It laments and celebrates black experience it takes themes and plays variations upon them it plunges, soars, and lingers. It is born out of, and evokes, both pain and pleasure. It is rhythmic, emotional, controlled even in its wildest moments, skilful, subversive and irresistibly seductive. Toni Morrison’s new novel is like the music that gave it its title.
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