Jazz was the sixth novel published by the Pulitzer and Nobel Prize-winning American author Toni Morrison. A reviewer for Entertainment Weekly observed that the novel's title alludes to Morrison's prose style: "long, looping improvisations full of recognizable blues melodies on the subjects of love, death, jealous rage, the serenity of reconciliation--that never go quite where you think they're going." Appearing early in Jazz, this passage establishes the colloquial tone of the novel.
from Jazz (1992)
by Toni Morrison
I’m crazy about this City.
Daylight slants like a razor cutting the buildings in half. In the top half I see distracted looking faces and it’s not easy to tell which are the people, which the work of stonemasons. Below is a shadow where any blasé thing takes place: clarinets and lovemaking, fists and the voices of sorrowful women. A city like this one makes me dream tall and feel in on things. Hep. It’s the bright steel rocking above the shade below that does it. When I look over strips of green grass lining the river, at church steeples and into the cream-and-copper halls of apartment buildings, I’m strong. Alone, yes, but top-notch and indestructible--like the City in 1926 when all the wars are over and there will never be another one. The people down there in the shadows are happy about that. At last, at last, everything’s ahead. The smart ones say so and people listening to them and reading what they write down agree: Here comes the new. Look out. There goes the sad stuff. The bad stuff. The things-nobody-could-help stuff. The way everybody was then and there. Forget that. History is over, you all, and everything’s ahead at last.
Toni Morrison's Jazz was republished by Vintage in 2004.
