Books: Riffs On Violence

TITLE: JAZZ

AUTHOR: TONI MORRISON

PUBLISHER: KNOPF; 229 PAGES; $21

THE BOTTOM LINE: Enchanting voices surround but do not solve a mystery.

THIS NOVEL, TONI MORRISON’S sixth, takes only its first five sentences to disclose the central plot. Within a few more pages, most of the details have been provided. The setting is Harlem, the year 1926. Joe Trace, 50, shoots and kills Dorcas Manfred, the teenage girl with whom he has been having a clandestine affair. When Joe’s wife Violet, also 50, hears what has happened, she goes to Dorcas’ funeral and takes a butcher knife to the dead girl’s face.

These spasms of violence form the somber theme of Jazz, but most of the novel consists of riffs and variations. Different voices materialize, sometimes disembodied, sometimes belonging to casual onlookers or to the principal characters themselves. The narrative glides between the present and the past, to the rural Virginia of the 1880s, where Joe and Violet met and from which they eventually migrated to the magical place they call the City.

Many of these interludes are enchanting. Morrison has few living peers at evoking both the particulars and the sensuousness of scenes, whether they be the bloom of an unexpectedly lush cotton crop or the arrival of spring on city streets: “What can beat bricks warming up in the sun? The return of awnings. The removal of blankets from horses’ backs.” Even her ventures into the mystical come furnished with details: “The music the world makes, familiar to fishermen and shepherds, woodsmen have also heard. It hypnotizes mammals. Bucks raise their heads and gophers freeze.”

But for all its local eloquence, Jazz never convincingly accounts for the horror that Joe and Violet feel compelled to wreak. That they have suffered — from white racism, poverty — is made abundantly clear. Their individual motives for lashing out as they do are not. Asked directly why he shot Dorcas, Joe says, “Scared. Didn’t know how to love anybody.” Asked why she tried to carve up a dead girl’s face, Violet answers, “I don’t know.” Great fiction explains the inexplicable. By that standard, Jazz measures up as very good.