Jazz

"I had the enormous privilege of interviewing Toni Morrison a few years ago for the Guardian . We talked about Jazz a bit and in this sweetly, self-mockingly disgruntled way she said “Yeah, I really liked it, it is overlooked”. It’s set in the 1920s and in it there’s a beautiful commingling of jazz, Harlem streets and a sense of romance and possibility. The novel, formally, feels like a piece of jazz. It feels like riffs and improvisations and recurring refrains. In that sense it’s a fairly experimental novel, which is perhaps why it hasn’t been as seized upon, or lauded, within her oeuvre. Again, I think it’s a novel of desire and intoxication, something we keep coming back as we talk about New York and its fictions. Absolutely. Although, is there any such thing as a little life? I like to think most lives are large, at least to the people living them. But yes, I deeply admire all those novels which do both, the little lives—the tiny domestic moments, the gradations of emotion within an interaction—as well as the largeness—the forces of history and culture inflecting all those little lives. Though it’s set in the New York of the 1920s, Jazz reaches backwards into the history of the American South. It feels, in the same way as the city does, bigger than the sum of its parts. You described the city as “baggy”, which I think is a great word. The way that characters can feel enlarged by being in a place so large and so dense. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Jazz as a form of music is such a maximalist, expansive, liberated form, so it seems entirely appropriate to a city that so often shares those characteristics, a city that—not to be hopelessly romantic about it—often does promise, falsely or otherwise, a limitlessness, a sense of expansion. A few years ago, there was a spate of books that were about, or set, in 1970s New York. There was James Wolcott’s memoir Lucking Out and of course Patti Smith’s Just Kids , which was such a phenomenon. I am not exempting myself from enthusiasm about those books, but romanticising anything always feels essentially dodgy and yes, it strikes me now that this little cultural moment was very white. More broadly speaking, we know of course that history gets written by the oppressors, that’s almost axiomatic. New York in the 1970s and 80s and even early 90s might have been readily romanticised if you were, say, a healthy, educated white musician living in a cheap loft, but if you were a person of colour the city was probably shitting on you. My understanding is that Robert Moses did a lot of damage, in that respect. Yes, I love the idea that literature can be a sort of reclamation. I think that pertains to the Holleran novel too. It’s this really exquisite and explicit depiction of gay life and a whole world that had to be closeted because of both legal and social constraints, or disapprobation. But reading, potentially, is open to anyone—though we could have a whole other conversation about the whiteness of the publishing world… It’s always been interesting to me that Toni Morrison has said explicitly “I’m writing for black people”. That seems courageous and honest and deeply admirable. That was something I was trying to evoke in the novel. There’s a scene where the character Bill stumbles across what turns out to be a Santeria sacrifice in Prospect Park, Park Slope: a place I thought of as one-note in its character, specifically: wealthy white families pushing strollers. And, of course, as with every part of New York, there are different layers and different communities in every place, it is different things to different people. That is so thrilling to me, and I guess this takes us full-circle to the idea of the palimpsest and layered lives: we can move through a space and be inhabiting just one layer and yet there are all these other simultaneous layers or dimensions happening. Exactly. Because, as you said, the writer has interiority as one of her tools. And of course language itself, which… well, it’s the subtlest, most layered medium of all, right?"