Jazz - Toni Morrison

It is winter, barely three days into 1926, seven years after Armistice we are in the scintillating City, around Lenox Avenue, when all the wars are over and there will never be another one. . . At last, at last everything's ahead. Here comes the new. Look out. There goes the sad stuff. The ba stuf. Thethings-nobody-could-help stuff. But amid the euphoric decisiveness, a gtragedy ensues among people who had 'train-danced' into the City, from points south and west, in search of a promise. Jor Trace - in his fifties, door-to-door salesman of Cleopatra beauty products, erstwhile devoted husband - shoots to death his lover of three months, impetuous, eighteen-year-old Dorcas ('Everything was like a picture show to her'). At the funeral, his determined, hard-working wife, Violet, herself a hairdresser - who is given to stumbling into dark mental cracks, and who talks mostly to birds -tries with a knife to disfigure the corpse. In a dazzling act of jazz-like improvisation, moving seamlessly in and out of past, present, and future, a mysterious voice - whose identity is a matter of each reader's imagination - weaves this brilliant fiction, at the same time showing how its BLUES are informed by the brutal exigencies of slavery.