Books in Brie

Jazz, by Toni Morrison (Knopf, 229 pp., $26)

THE novels of Toni Morrison tend to be curious amalgams of conflicting sights, sounds, and feelings—the beautiful and the ugly, tender and cruel, bitter and sweet— which in her gifted hands (Song of Solomon, Tar Baby, less so in Beloved) take on the quality of a spell. Here, in the Jazz Age Harlem of 1926, Joe and Violet Trace struggle to make a living. In their forties, drawn to “The City” by stories of the good life, they are barely one step removed from near-slavery in the cotton fields of rural Virginia. He is honest and dependable, she a decent woman of erratic mood, and they cope well enough until his infatuation with and subsequent murder of a girl of 18. Set against a background of rent par-

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Jazz, by Toni Morrison (Knopf, 229 pp., $26)

THE novels of Toni Morrison tend to be curious amalgams of conflicting sights, sounds, and feelings—the beautiful and the ugly, tender and cruel, bitter and sweet— which in her gifted hands (Song of Solomon, Tar Baby, less so in Beloved) take on the quality of a spell. Here, in the Jazz Age Harlem of 1926, Joe and Violet Trace struggle to make a living. In their forties, drawn to “The City” by stories of the good life, they are barely one step removed from near-slavery in the cotton fields of rural Virginia. He is honest and dependable, she a decent woman of erratic mood, and they cope well enough until his infatuation with and subsequent murder of a girl of 18. Set against a background of rent par-