cover image The Higher Jazz: A Novel by Edmund Wilson

The Higher Jazz: A Novel by Edmund Wilson

Edmund Wilson. University of Iowa Press, $34.95 (224pp) ISBN 978-0-87745-653-7

Prominent literary and cultural critic Wilson (To the Finland Station; The Wound and the Bow) left the manuscript of this Jazz Age chronicle, ""completed but not revised as a whole,"" to Yale's Beineke Library at his death in 1972. Wilson began the novel in 1941, while editing the literary remains of his friend F. Scott Fitzgerald. The novel tracks a couple much like Wilson and his first wife as they zip through and around the Manhattan of 1928 and '29, meeting characters and composites who convey the decade's gilt, wit and roar. Narrator Fritz Dietrich is on the outskirts of the avant-garde musical scene in New York. Educated at Yale and rendered thereby mildly insufferable, he is married to another scion of wealth, Caroline Stokes, who typifies the cocktail shaker set. With an eye and ear for fashion and upper-class folly that may remind admirers of Tom Wolfe, Wilson treats us to a bird's eye view of the ""whole night club racket,"" the Hudson Valley gentry and the Algonquin Table regulars, and his thinly disguised portraits of Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley are oddly touching. The Parker character, Kay Burke, is a morbid, witty, troubled woman continually hovering between suicide and repartee. Fritz, with his musical aspirations, attempts to fuse classical music and more popular rhythms, an effort that give the novel its title. Skillful editor Neale Reinitz provides a foreword and afterword, along with useful explanatory notes. (Nov.)