Toni Morrison 'Jazz'ing Up Your Tuesday Morning

An avid reader, I often find when reading a book that you’ve heard it all before. Boy meets girl, boy loses girl in stupid accident that is all his fault, boy finally wins girl back. It’s all a bit Jennifer Aniston for me. This week, I present to you a corny sentence but a great book: it’s all about adding a little Jazz into your life(!)
Jazz is a story of love and loss in the African-American ghetto of the 1920’s. Rhythmic and catchy, it centres much around the blues movement starting out at the time, and steals much of its passionate sadness. This passionate sadness is blunt and stares in your face. It doesn’t care what you think. It knows where it comes from. You feel, when reading this text suffused with so much of this daring misery, that perhaps you actually lived in the place.

Love becomes a theme of the novel in many ways: it explores different forms of legitimate or illegitimate love, why we need love, love’s history, love’s spaces, love’s unpredictability, and also the irony of loving somebody you expected to hate (and maybe already have, with a seething, uncontrollable, Mr. Burns sneer). It is not really romantic, however, which is surprising. I am grateful for this lack of romanticism: if we wanted it, we’d be in 18th Century Romanticism (an area most feel they’ve done with quickly).

Loss in the text is wise, but also dramatic and passionate in Morrison’s novel, depending on who is experiencing the loss. Again, the loss is surprising. Again, it is not always romantic. It is an interesting point raised in these pages that romantic love and loss just aren’t that much of a big deal, in comparison to what life has to offer otherwise. People cheat, people find other people they like more, people never really liked each other that much in the first place, yada yada.

Instead of the traditional whinge, it is nice to embrace that sadness and make it boldly beautiful. It is the way in which Morrison does this in the novel that also reminds me of the singer Tracey Chapman (come on, you all must know her): her unashamed desperation and focus on family, heritage, and grassroots, with the odd bit of romance shunted in. Soul sisters indeed.

For those that like a little verse, it is also quite poetic. I would like to take this statement to point out that’s it’s not actually a new book; I like to think of it as a classic that injects a little sassy flavour into the bookshelf. However, if you like your John Clancys and your Danielle Steels, don’t touch it with a ten-foot sewer pole. It is not plain spoken. It’s too beautiful for $30 Whitcoulls shopfronters. You might have to search on Amazon for it, but it is well worth the read. Plus, when you do, there are several brothers and sisters of the text that advise, inform, and strum the violin along with it. Desperate poetry.