Jazz Themes

Yeah, a novel that starts with the shooting of an ex-girlfriend and a woman who tries to slice open a dead girl's face is going to be a little bloody. Leave your squeamishness at the door for this...

It's no shocker that the art form in a novel called Jazz is jazz music. The novel's structure borrows heavily from jazz music, including different character solos, a preoccupation with lust and vio...

Mommy issues alert: Everyone has beef with motherhood in Jazz. And we don't blame them—most of the mamas in this novel are nowhere to be found. This makes us want to call our mothers right now. I...

Let us count the ways in which the racial identity impacts the characters in Jazz. No, let's not, because if we started we'd be here well into next week. From jazz music to the Great Migration, fro...

You know the cute story about the city mouse and the country mouse? How the city mouse swears the city is just swell, so the country mouse visits, but isn't completely blown away? And then the city...

In a novel with two fifty-year-olds as main characters, it's no surprise that memory is a big dealio in Jazz. And in a novel as historic as Jazz, it's no surprise that memory is a huge theme. And s...

What's more unreliable than a second grader claiming the dog ate her homework? All of the characters in Jazz.It's no secret that everyone's reality is a little different from everyone else's. Ask t...

And by innocence, we mean total lack of innocence. The Jazz Age was notorious for being a period when innocence was lost, specifically the presumed innocence of women. Behavior that was truly scand...

There is a lot of sultry saxophone music in Jazz, both literally and metaphorically. Lust is one of the huge motivators for the characters in Jazz: It starts the action with a bang (that kills Dorc...