Fiction Subjects, Peoples & Cultures - Fiction

The Higher Jazz

Name: The Higher Jazz
Author: Edmund Wilson
ISBN: 9780641534423

by Edmund Wilson, Neale Reinitz (Editor), Neale Reinitz (Introduction)

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Overview

Edmund Wilson, the preeminent American literary critic of the first half of the twentieth century, often fretted that he was not taken seriously as a creative writer. Though he completed in draft this short novel, now entitled The Higher Jazz, it was never published. In mid-career, in 1939, Wilson planned a novel in three parts that would carry a man through fifteen years as a stockbroker, a Russian diplomat, and a writer. When he started on the first section of this book, set in the 1920s, it carried him away from his original project. His hero was instead transformed into a German American businessman who, aspiring to become a composer, seeks the spirit of America in music that combined the contemporary popular and the modern classical, in what Wilson called elsewhere "the higher jazz." This portrayal of the 1920s provides a sense of the elusive glories of the Boom Era. Neale Reintz has edited The Higher Jazz for the general reader. His introduction sets the novel in the historical context of Wilson's life and writings, and his annotations explain the topical references and, more important, illustrate Wilson's method of composition.

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Editorials

David Walton

. . .[T]here are too many characters in the novel, and not much plot for them to be essential to. . . .mildly engaging, but never very captivating. — The New York Times Book Review

Jed Pearl

The Higher Jazz adds a dozen precious scenes and vignettes to Edmund Wilson's already panoramic view of America in the 1920s. Wilson brings a light, comic, rather aloof tone to these sketches of life before the crash. -- The New Republic

David Walton

. . .[T]here are too many characters in the novel, and not much plot for them to be essential to. . . .mildly engaging, but never very captivating. -- The New York Times Book Review

Kirkus Reviews

This unfinished and hitherto unpublished novel, drafted and then set aside by prodigious critic Wilson in the early '40s, offers some wonderfully vivid glimpses of the feverish last moments of the Jazz Age. It's set in a two-year span, culminating in the Crash of 1929 and following the life of Fritz Dietrich, a young businessman who's struggling to make a life as a composer. Included are haunting set-pieces that depict Fritz's uneasy circulation among Manhattan's nightclubs, burlesque shows, and florid artistic circles. Meanwhile, Wilson's mordant wit and sharp eye are much in evidence, as is his habit of introducing thinly veiled fictional portraits of friends and lovers. Fritz, though, remains something of a cipher, and because Wilson put away the manuscript before Fritz's quest had reached any conclusion, the story doesn't so much end as simply peter out. Still, this comes as a welcome addition to the Wilson canon, offering fresh, frank snapshots of Manhattan in the '20s, and reminding us that Wilson—though his great gift was criticism—also showed considerable skill as a novelist.