Jazz

Toni Morrison · 1931–2019 · USA

Why it matters

A Harlem husband shoots his teenage lover, and his wife attacks the corpse at the funeral: a love triangle Morrison narrates like a jazz solo, circling back to improvise on its own plot. The Great Migration's interior life, set to the music of the 1920s.

At a glance

A self-revising, improvisatory narrator deliberately scrambles chronology and reliability.