If you can't make the world what you want it to be, what good is it? Joe Trace, a door-to-door Cleopatra beauty product salesman in his forties and a former loving husband, shoots the impetuous, eighteen-year-old Dorcas, his three-month lover, to death. At the funeral, Violet, his tenacious, hardworking wife, who is prone to falling into deep mental chasms, makes an attempt to disfigure the corpse with a knife. In a story built from the aspirations, anxieties, and realities of black urban life, Jazz is passionate and profound.