Jazz

by Toni Morrison

I loved this book. I had been reading a lot of light fluffy stuff and was ready for something a little more dense. Even though this only took me a week to get through, it's not a very long book and was much more thought-provoking than anything else I've read lately. This is the kind of book you don't zip through. You have to sip it slowly and really savor it. I will probably need to read it at least once more in order to fully appreciate it.

I adore Toni Morrison's writing. I admire her ability to just ignore the standard laws of writing. For example, while most of us feel obligated to put commas after each item in a list, she feels no such compulsion. Yet it works phenomenally well because commas create pauses in our prose and Morrison doesn't want those pauses. It gives her writing a sense of flow, but it doesn't get out of control. I read once that she tries to make her writing sound like jazz and I think she has mastered that art. Her creative use of grammar gives her writing a musical quality. It seems to carry you along with it as she tells you her story. I found myself completely absorbed by it and angry at the phone for ringing when I was clearly trying to read this book! Rude!

Morrison also feels no need to tell her story in a chronological manner and I'm also totally okay with that. The only problem was I did have trouble in some parts trying to figure out what happened when and how it related to other events in the story. Hence my need to re-read this book. Maybe not right away, but someday. I promise you though, all the events and characters are related to each other, some of them in surprising ways.

I'm also in awe of Morrison's choice of narrator in that she was not omniscient. She would write a chapter where a character explained their thoughts and actions and then the narrator would step back and speculate as to why that character did such-and-such or what they thought about a certain event. And she wouldn't even reach a conclusion. She would merely state that she wondered about it, maybe put forth a few theories, and then move on. I loved that because it made it feel like I was reading this story with the narrator, rather than having the narrator tell me the story. It was as if we were discovering these people and events together.