Score: 8.5
The first reading of a Toni Morrison novel is like eating your favourite meal for the first time. To start all you have is the aroma, the cover, a blurb, maybe an image. It's enough to give a brief outline, teasing your senses, but nothing more. Then you crack it open and with the first bite you're completely overwhelmed. It's all there at the start - the texture, the contours, the flavour, the spice, the moisture, any sauces, any hints of a well-incorporated core. The first thirty or fourty pages can leave you breathless, confused, and unsure of much, beyond that your appetite has been whetted.
Then you continue reading, and each bite is more succulent than the last, each one of those initial qualities takes over one of the mouthfuls, and before you know it, you've devoured the plate. Every character, every temptation, history, human emotion and animal reason has been consumed, and at the end of it all, you love it. You can't imagine not knowing these characters, their flavours, the way they move and the people they love. It's your new favourite book and as good as it was, you can't imagine eating again for some time. It's quite an investment.
Jazz, her 1992 novel about black country folk moving into the big City in the heady 1920's is a Toni Morrison novel through and through. It won't let you forget it, from the overwhelming intro the final statement of purpose, expressed through the simple holding of hands, you can tell it'll be another favourite before you've put it down. All the elements of Morrison's trademark are present - deft weaving of past and present narratives, evocative writing that seems to build metaphor upon metaphor to the point of near-incredulity, and characters you will remember, whether you want to or not. Yet something is lacking. In the preamble, Morrison relates Jazz to her previous masterwork, Beloved, linking them thematically. Yet where Beloved succeeded because of it's seamless connection between style, subject matter and character development, Jazz is lacking.
Though I doubt I would ever review it here, Beloved is likely the only book I could ever give a perfect 10.0 to. It's still the absolute best at nearly all the things I hold dear in writing. It is about slavery, pure and simple. One word describes its whole topic. Somehow, Morrison managed to convey nearly every single problem, ramification and personal experience (I can only imagine this last point) related to slavery in a masterly whirlwind of poetic prose and postmodern narrative structure. It is as close to perfect as one can hope.
Jazz is a bit more convoluted. The title would have you believe one thing, but jazz itself doesn't really play a huge role, it is the narrative voice, and in that sense behaves in a way typical to jazz: it's a bit scattered, graceful, and most certainly oftputting if taken in in small pieces. However, that narrative roleplay, as good as it has the potential to be, never truly becomes effective in any way in Jazz. Similarly, the characters, as interesting as they may be, seem a little bit underdeveloped by the end, perhaps with a tad one too many. The central two are excellently done, but unevenly so, with one being far more interesting than the other, and the third central character not really being explained very well at all.
Similarly, the plot seems at best hard to follow, and at it's worst (I can't believe I'm about to write this) trite. The two lover characters are connected through a convoluted chain of knowledge, and they don't really need to be. Nothing is really achieved in the overall terms of the novel by having the two linked. It could be the scattershot way I read the novel, but it definitely lacked a compelling sense of drive within the plot; almost as though it was a collection of individual stories and characters Morrison tied together through a central incident. Reasonable, but not spellbinding by any measure.
The writing, as always with Morrison, is stupendous, and there were several times I was simply caught in the beauty of the phrasing, or even a simple response a character would make. "I didn't fall in love, I rose in it." Simply stellar. It's enough to lift up a sometimes dreary book into the realm of excellence. Just don't expect it to do much more than that.
[Addendum]
On the whole, Jazz never achieves the singularity of purpose that infused Beloved. It is not a pure depiction of black life in an historic urban reality, and it is not even an effective documentation of the transition from rural to urban that it seems to touch upon.
