Literature is full of characters who find their way to New York to remake themselves, from Jay Gatsby to Holly Golightly. In Toni Morrison's 1992 novel Jazz , Joe and Violet Trace arrive in Harlem during the Great Migration with hopes of moving past the violence and indignities of the rural South, only to find that the city offers no escape. I just finished reading Jazz and found it to be dazzling and thought-provoking, just like every other Toni Morrison novel I have read.