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The Healing

ebook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available
Gayl Jones's special gift is to shape experience and make it seem unshaped. -John Alfred Avant, The New Republic
Gayl Jones's first novel, Corregidora, won her recognition as a writer whose work was gripping, subtle, and sure. It was praised, along with her second novel, Eva's Man, by writers and critics from all over the nation: John Updike, Maya Angelou, John Edgar Wideman, and James Baldwin, to name a few. The publication of The Healing, her first novel in over twenty years, is a literary event.
Harlan Jane Eagleton is a faith healer, traveling by bus to small towns, converting skeptics, restoring minds and bodies. But before that she was a minor rock star's manager, and before that a beautician. She's had a fling with her rock star's ex-husband and an Afro-German horse dealer; along the way she's somehow lost her own husband, a medical anthropologist now traveling with a medicine woman in Africa. Harlan tells her story from the end backwards, drawing us constantly deeper into her world and the mystery at the heart of her tale-the story of her first healing.
The Healing is a lyrical and at times humorous exploration of the struggle to let go of pain, anger, and even love. Slipping seamlessly back through Harlan's memories in a language rich with the textured cadences of the black Southerner, Gayl Jones weaves her story to its dramatic-and unexpected-beginning.
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    • Publisher's Weekly

      February 2, 1998
      Jones's first major American publication since Eva's Man (1976) is prickly, frequently tendentious and occasionally brilliant. From the opening pages we know we're in the presence of a masterly writer whose life experiences have sharpened her edges rather than softened them. The narrator, African American faith-healer Harlan Jane Eagleton, travels from small town to small town working her miracles. But, as we soon learn, being a healer is only her latest incarnation after stints as a beautician in her hometown of Louisville, Ky., as a racetrack gambler and as a business manager for the rock-'n-roller Joan Savage. Harlan is more sure of what she's not (anybody's fool) than what she is, and underneath her "countrified" voice is a shrewd observer of human nature. She is also remarkably well read in theories of art, science, literature and music--and she proves it at every opportunity, in long-winded diatribes too often explained away with a coy "I read about that somewhere." Despite Harlan's tiresomely false naivete (and the tedious political speechifying of the people she meets), readers will care about her and will eagerly follow her journey to heal herself first before she can touch others ("If I wasn't the one doing the healing, I'd be among the tough nuts"). It is through her flawed but gravely human voice that Jones's flinty work is quietly redeemed. (Feb.) FYI: The Healing is the first novel Beacon has published in its 143-year history. The press plans to issue another novel by Jones, as well as a book-length poem of hers, in 1999.

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  • English

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