Mary Morris: The Jazz Palace, 9780385539739, Nan Talese, Doubleday

During a visit to Chicago this summer, I came across ‘Mary Morris: The Jazz Palace’ in a book shop, I was immediately attracted to the novel  as it is set in Chicago during the beginning of the Jazz Age starting in 1915.  I have been coming to Chicago on a fairly regular base since 1989; one of my dearest friends lives in the windy city. The city has grown on me with each visit; I love the colorful neighborhoods, bars, restaurants, the amazing architecture, and the music scene, the high rises by Mies van der Rohe, the Art Institute and the Lake in particular. 

I read Morris “Nothing to Declare: Memoirs of a Woman Travelling Alone” many years ago, loved it and was happy to find this book by an author I admired on a subject that really interested me.  As if by serendipity I had just visited an exhibition on Archibald Motley, a black painter and Jazz Age Modernist who portrayed this era exquisitely in his paintings.

So I started the novel with great curiosity but despite the wonderful quotes by such famous authors as Jodi Picoult and other readers on the back cover, I just never really warmed to the book however much I wanted to.  I cannot really put my finger on the why but I always felt the story was lacking something, perhaps because it is ultimately such a sad tale with only a touch of happiness at the end.  The story is well crafted; Morris is an accomplished author, it took her two decades to finish this novel.  The lives of the main characters and their families, Pearl Chimbrova who runs the Jazz Palace, Napoleon, the black trumpet player and Benny Lehmann, the magical Jewish piano player who has no interest in the family business, are all tragically linked together. The milieu of Chicago in the Twenties is very well portrayed with gangsters like Al Capone ruling the clubs and the police, the impoverished Jewish and Black neighborhoods, the European immigrants forking out a meager existence in factories in the even harsher Chicago winter, Jazz musicians going from gig to gig living hand to mouth being virtually owned by the gangsters, these are the most interesting, vivid and colorful descriptions in the book, Morris does a great job characterizing Chicago during that time drawing from actual facts. 

I love the cover of the book , a painting called "J Mood" by Romare Bearden owned by the Wynton Marsales and Romare Bearden Foundation.