On (Re)Reading Toni Morrison’s Jazz
Why do I love this story? Is it just the sheer bliss of Morrison’s words spilling across the page, yes, like the jazz of the title, uncontained, perfect, prose you can dance to?
It’s her writing, yes, the beauty of it, but more besides. It’s a story–is it ever a messed-up story–about a husband and wife and the man’s 18-year-old lover who he’s shot dead, (don’t worry, that’s no spoiler, you learn all of this in the first page or two) about love and redemption but violence too and most of all it’s a love letter to New York, or as she calls it just the City because where else could it be?
And I’m in love with New York as much as the childless couple here who’ve forgotten, for a while, how to love one another.
It’s not a feminist story, not if you’re going to be angry at excuses made for characters’ inexcusable actions. A man kills a woman and isn’t the villain? Is sad and sweet and forgiven, at least a little? No, we don’t want to read that, right? But Toni is Literature and she gets a pass where pop fiction is pilloried. It is assumed that she’s writing About Something.
And oh, she is. She’s writing about love. And how very, very strange and messy it is. And Toni does not create halfway characters so we get inside the loves of all of them here, we see the hurt and the joy. The wild excitement and the emptiness of loss. We understand why Joe Trace would want to kill the girl he loved, because we have all hurt like that and loved like that and been willing to offer ourselves for another second of it. Or to kill.
Or maybe that’s just me.
Or maybe it’s what I’d like to think.
I haven’t read all of her books but Jazz is my favorite and it’s one of my favorite books, period. Top three, definitely, and on a morning like this on the subway in the City having just closed it and savoring it in my mouth and heart like a goodbye kiss before reopening it and starting it again, it’s number one.
I asked about romance and epic stories that are bigger than we are, but the beauty here is the truth of it: that all of our loves are Love Stories and that in the end they’re what we have. They are not neat and easy and they hurt like hell, hurt enough to die of, and they don’t end with a kiss or even most of the time a bang. No, we have to keep living and figure them out.
And they’re true.
*written on the subway in the morning, scribbled the old fashioned way, in a notebook.