Is intercepted and later lets loose her pet birds into the snow, rather in the manner of the eccentric Miss Flite in Dickens's 'Bleak House.'

Nobody sees him do it, Alice, her aunt and guardian, decides not 'to throw money to helpless lawyers or laughing cops.' Come the fateful day Violet takes a butcher's knife to Dorcas's face in the funeral parlor, In a fit of passion Joe shoots Dorcas, but because Joe, purveyor of illusion, sells Cleopatra Cosmetics, and thus finds Dorcas and beds her clandestinely in an apartment not far from the bedroom where he and Violet had their youthful nighttime fiestas. She craves because 'that's the kick.' The effect is of a prism being held up before us in order to glimpse its shifting multifarious worlds. There is also Felice, Dorcas's friend, looking in on this triangular stew and on love itself, which Violet, the wronged wife, is a many-faceted creatureĪnd, like Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf, admits to many selves within herself, occasionally stumbling into a psychotic limbo. WE are with Joe, Violet and Dorcas, the temptress whose melting shadow stalks the pages of Toni Morrison's latest novel, 'Jazz.' We are with youth versus age, sterility versus sex, the swamps versus the gaudy hubbub of 'city.'Īt night in their musty apartment in Harlem, Joe and Violet, the husband and wife, get up intermittently to study the photograph of the dead girl and respond with mutterings of love, jealousy and bile. April 5, 1992, Sunday, Late Edition - Final

Toni morrison jazz review