Review: The Jazz Palace

The Jazz Palace by Mary Morris
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is simultaneously an historical novel and a jazz novel. There’s no reason it can’t be both at once, of course, but it turns out to be a very good short jazz novel while only a pretty good historical one.

The central story here is tied into history. The opening scene is harrowing as our two eventual main characters – Benny and Pearl – first glimpse one another on the afternoon of the Eastland disaster, to this day the largest number of deaths ever to take place in Chicago. Benny tries in vain to rescue victims of the toppled ship, and Pearl, too young to do anything herself, has to deal with a grief-maddened mother who seems intent on killing her and her sisters.

The prose, as it is throughout, begins to sing from the beginning. In one stunning line, Morris compares Benny’s clutching the body of a dead young woman to the idea that he has his first kiss with a dead woman. It’s a great image, and it foreshadows Benny’s later career. He’ll always seem to be longing for a woman who isn’t there, for something larger and darker than what he has already known.

From Eastland, the story moves to Prohibition, and we see the way it and the eventual Depression shape the lives of the two families. The dream of Chicago – the way it rose from the great fire and made itself into one of the world’s great cities in a matter of decades – seems like a individual promise. As it plays out, though, the characters are generally disappointed. Their great business plans go awry; they lose loved ones; they find they aren’t becoming the self-reliant adults they imagined they would be.

In that light, jazz become the soundtrack of their sadness. Benny finds himself drawn to playing piano whenever he gets the chance. He’s haunted by melody and changing tempo, and he grows into an accomplished jazz player. Pearl is instrumental in turning her family’s store into a speakeasy – the jazz palace – where assorted musicians come to play and where, eventually, she meets Benny again.

This book is at its best when Morris lets us experience the way the jazz of their moment works as the soundtrack of their unrealized ambitions. They’re hungry for something larger than what the world is offering, and Benny specializes in performances that take raucous music, slow it to something that brings its listeners to the brink of tears, and then speeds it up again. It’s enough to make Pearl fall in love with him – Pearl, the woman who takes comfort in long lake swims where she both recalls and rises above the experience of the Eastland disaster. At the same time, it takes him further from her into his own mind, his own disappointments.

Morris writes beautifully about all that, and it’s where the novel works best. It works a little less well – or, to put it differently, a little more conventionally – in the way it weaves the larger timeline into the events of its characters’ lives. I may be biased because this is a Chicago I know very well, but we get some oversimplification and an occasional “error” or alteration of fact. (I acknowledge I’m being petty, but we get a reference to the Sun-Times newspaper before the Sun existed and certainly before the Times merged with it. Also, while it’s a clever anecdote, Dean O’Banion knew very well for whom he was preparing flowers in the day he was killed – it was Unione Siciliano boss Mike Merlo. He did not, that is, prepare them for a mysterious someone who turned out to be himself.)

In addition, as well as Morris writes in general, some of the stop-the-story-and-update-the-history passages seem, well, conventional next to the more intriguing, alternate time signatures of the jazz passages.

Still, Morris shows here that she is yet another seriously skilled faculty member at Sarah Lawrence College where my son will start in the fall. I’m excited for him; being surrounded by this kind of talent will have to help him grow as a writer himself.


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