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Tag Archives: jazz

Murder Jambalaya: King Zeno

11 Monday Jun 2018

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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book review, First World War, historical fiction, hodgepodge, jazz, literary fiction, mystery fiction, narrative confusion, Nathaniel Rich, New Orleans, racism, sociopath

Review: King Zeno, by Nathaniel Rich
FSG, 2018. 386 pp. $28

During the final year of the First World War, three narratives and a hell of a lot of dead bodies converge in New Orleans. The main story line belongs to Isidore (Izzy) Zeno, the best young cornet player no one’s ever heard of, who believes he has a new style of jass, as it’s then called, but can’t get gigs. To make ends meet, he aids a friend who’s a stickup artist, but the risks are far greater than the rewards, and that sort of sideline is destined to cause trouble.

Then there’s Bill Bastrop, a police detective assigned to deal with the stickups but switches to homicide detail when a friend and mentor on the force is killed one night in a setup. That, in turn, leads Bill to probe the rash of ax murders that the dead detective was investigating. However, Bill can barely hold it together, suffering from what would today be called post-traumatic stress from his wartime service. He received a hero’s acclaim, but he knows he’s a coward, and he lives with it every second. How Bill managed to be released from the army with the war still going on is a mystery itself. But suffice to say that he’s miserable, obsessed with breaking a case that will redeem him in his own eyes, for which he neglects the wife he loves.

Finally, there’s Beatrice Vizzini, a widow from an underworld family who wants to leave the “shadow business” and go straight. To that end, she’s managing the effort to build a canal that will split New Orleans in two and, the city fathers hope, restore the port to its erstwhile glory. Her sociopathic son and heir, Giorgio, may have other ideas about her business strategy, and to say he’s a loose cannon is an understatement.

New Orleans shantytown during the war years (courtesy National Library of Medicine via University of Michigan)

Meanwhile, with all that, influenza ravages the city, so plenty happens in King Zeno. Too much, in fact, and it burdens the novel. The three narratives coincide only toward the end, when it takes a fair amount of contrivance to make that junction. The mystery hardly qualifies as a puzzle, for the solution is pretty clear early on, though the bodies keep piling up, in the streets and at the canal excavation site. The Vizzini narrative, easily the weakest of the three because the characters are neither engaging nor sympathetic, could drop out entirely. That would also remove the tendentious, thematic passages in which Rich tries to convince you that the canal is a metaphor that links this narrative to the other two. I don’t see it.

What King Zeno does have going for it is the atmosphere of New Orleans. You get the mosquitoes, the heat, the wealth alongside poverty, the racism, sainted past that was never glorious. The vigorous prose lets you hear the music, too:

Isidore pressed the cornet to his lips and the old chemical combustion — oxygen plus metal times flesh — blew everything else out of his head. He’d heard other players describe performing as a jubilant mindlessness, a physical sensation as ecstatic as sexual euphoria, but that wasn’t quite right. He used his mind too, running through scales the way Mr. Davis at the Waifs’ Home had taught him, calculating fourths and fifths; adding crooks, slurs, and drags; scanning ahead four bars in anticipation; posing and, within milliseconds, resolving questions of harmonic density, chordal patterning, and understructure…

More importantly, the narrative conveys implicitly the crime and corruption that pervade every human interaction, the fear with which African-Americans cope constantly, and the subterfuges they must embrace. For instance, Izzy may not visit his wife, Orleania, except in secret, for she’s a live-in nanny in a white home. Even to try is dangerous, for security guards patrol the streets, looking to abuse people they consider interlopers.

Izzy’s story therefore makes gripping reading, as does Bill’s, often, but only as separate entities. As a whole, King Zeno doesn’t feel like a satisfying literary dish as much as a jambalaya of varied flavors. Some stand out, some I can do without, but they don’t go together.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Scarred Lives: The Jazz Palace

04 Monday May 2015

Posted by Novelhistorian in Uncategorized

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1915, 1920s, Al Capone, Chicago, gangsters, historical fiction, inner lives, jazz, Jews, Mary Morris, music, Prohibition, race relations

Review: The Jazz Palace, by Mary Morris
Doubleday, 2015. 245 pp. $26
It’s 1915, and Chicago’s South Side has its clubs where black musicians assume that the very few white patrons must be there to steal their secrets. But that’s not why young Benny Lehrman hangs around, using the money intended for his piano teacher to bribe his way past the door. Jazz, whose name Benny doesn’t even know at first, reaches him because it says everything the tongue-tied, soulful teenager can’t put into words.

Jazz speaks of loneliness bred in the bone, of having to drag yourself to a job you hate, of desire for the kindness, attention, and sympathy he can never have and believes he doesn’t deserve. Underlying his pain is a family tragedy: Several years before, his younger brother, the family favorite, died in a blizzard. Ever since, Benny has unfairly taken the blame.

However, the novel opens on a different catastrophe. Three of Pearl Chimbrova’s brothers die when the S.S. Eastland rolls over and sinks just after leaving the dock. Benny, who happens to be watching from the same footbridge as Pearl, dives into the water and tries to help, but the bodies he pulls out are already dead. Even without reading the jacket flap, you know Pearl and Benny will meet again.

S.S. Eastland, ca. 1911. (Detroit Publishing Co., Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons).

S.S. Eastland, ca. 1911. (Detroit Publishing Co., Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons).

Pearl’s mother never recovers, leaving her eldest daughter to pick up the pieces. As the years pass, Pearl takes over more and more responsibility for running the family saloon and mothering her younger sisters. Like Benny, she believes that she doesn’t deserve care or attention. Only routine keeps her going.

For Benny, it’s music, as he pursues learning jazz with a single-mindedness and energy he has never shown toward anything else. When he hears Napoleon Hill on trumpet, he knows why:


Everything he’d ever known about the world–that gravity holds you down and mothers are there when you get home, that baseball has nine innings, and sleep awaits you at the end of the day–was turned upside down. He forgot about his brother lost in the snow and the dead girl he’d danced with when the Eastland went down. . . . He even forgot he was a person in a crowd, not a very old person at that, just a boy. His arms and legs all melted into one. He wasn’t anywhere but inside the music he was hearing.


Napoleon and Benny, African-American and Jew, become close friends and musical partners, drawn together in part by vulnerability. With the advent of Prohibition, Pearl’s saloon has turned into a speakeasy, and Napoleon plays there from time to time, a great risk for a black man to take in a white neighborhood. Naturally, Benny sits in one night, but if you think you know the rest, you’ll have to read this book to see why Morris is too good a novelist to take the low road.

The Chimbrovas, the Lehrmans, Napoleon, every character in this book, even Al Capone, has been emotionally (if not physically) scarred. In this world of pain, in which warm currents drift through–sometimes within reach, sometimes not–there are no answers, only doing what you have to. But there are dreams, for those who dare, whether it’s just to be able to keep going, or to reach for something that might, one day, feel like happiness.

As I’ve said recently, I generally dislike novels about crossed paths, but The Jazz Palace nails it. I could explain that by saying that Morris opens up her characters’ inner lives, gets beneath their skins, and writes lyrically in the bargain. But it’s also that these people, like their creator, know they can’t afford cheap sentiment, and that whatever they want must be earned.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Burdened by History

12 Monday Jan 2015

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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China, Communist, historical fiction, Japan, jazz, Nationalist, Nicole Mones, race prejudice, romance, Shanghai, World War II

Review: Night in Shanghai, by Nicole Mones
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014. 277 pp. $30

What’s that, an American jazz musician who can’t improvise? A Western-educated Shanghai beauty sold by her father to a crime lord? Put them together, and you have a romance as atmospheric as they get. Throw in the Japanese invasion of China, and you have Night in Shanghai, a late 1930s tale of back-stabbing politics and love against tall odds.

A girl scout, Yang Huimin, smuggled a Nationalist flag into a Shanghai warehouse besieged by Japanese forces in 1937. (Courtesy Wikipedia.)

A girl scout, Yang Huimin, smuggled a Nationalist flag into a Shanghai warehouse besieged by Japanese forces in 1937. (Courtesy Wikipedia.)

Thomas Greene is a classically trained pianist, an African-American from Baltimore recruited by the agent of a Chinese mafioso to lead an all-black jazz orchestra. Jazz is a very big deal in Shanghai, and Thomas is startled and pleased to earn a good salary and live where his race doesn’t matter, or, as he puts it, “no one looked at him twice, for the first time in his life.” However, the music comes hard (he must have a written score, or he’s lost), and his struggles are so obvious that the more experienced jazzmen he’s supposed to lead look down on him. I liked this touch, which I thought made his character more sympathetic as well as unusual.

As Thomas gets the hang of his job, his eye falls on Song Yuhua, translator for the crime boss, who’d kill both of them if he (or his many henchmen) saw them together. But Song has her own secret: She’s a Communist, in a city where Nationalist thugs working for Chiang Kai-shek regularly murder Party members. She believes fervently in the cause, and she expects her superiors to share her ideals, because, after all, they’re on the same side. But history is working against her, just as it’s working against Thomas.

I liked the prose in Night in Shanghai the best, redolent as it is of the local food, manners, and metaphors. “To bring it up now would only create fear, just as speaking of a tiger makes one pale.” Or, of a person privileged by birth, “the waterfront pavilion gets moonlight first.” The physical descriptions are vivid too, as with this passage about Suzhou, adjacent to the city outskirts:


 

Beyond the gate, cobbled streets unwound beneath overhanging willows, soft in summer with green-dappled light. Canals were crossed by stone bridges whose half-moon arches made circles in the water. From the ponds and fields and wooded hills came peddlers with live flapping fish, caged ducks, bundles of freshwater greens, and tender shoots of baby green bamboo.


Unfortunately, the other aspects of the book didn’t always measure up, especially when compared with A Cup of Light, Mones’s gentle mystery novel about a porcelain expert. In that story, the tension never lapsed, even with nothing earthshaking at stake. But Night in Shanghai, for all its sound and fury, lets the protagonists off too easily, at times, diluting its power and promise. Writing so close to history is partly to blame–many secondary characters actually existed–so fact restricts what may or may not happen. I admire Mones’s commitment to the record, yet, after such a fine setup, history works against the narrative instead of for it.

Even so, I can recommend Night in Shanghai as a story about an unusual place at a crucial time. I learned more about China and the Japanese invasion, Shanghai as a city flooded by refugees (it required no entry visa), and, most particularly, that many African-American jazz musicians flocked there. The novel opened up this world to me, which I wouldn’t have known about otherwise.

Disclaimer: I borrowed my reading copy of this book from the public library.

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