[In the following review of The Healing, Grossman states that the book differs from Jones's earlier works but that her humanistic romance is as moving as her previous novels.]

The appearance of this novel by Gayl Jones, the first since her powerful debut in the 1970s with Corregidora and Eva's Man, is a notable event indeed. As her publishers report it, by the end of that decade Jones had abandoned her successful career as a fiction writer and teacher at the University of Michigan following “an incident of racial injustice.” Exiling herself to Europe for several years, she continued to write fiction, plays and poetry, occasionally publishing with small presses. Now, with The Healing, Jones announces a welcome return to the American scene, thematically and otherwise.

I found it hard (as many will) to read the new novel without recalling the impact of Jones’ early fiction—specifically, her portrayal of lives under extreme compulsion, from both external forces and a tyrannical and violent eros within. With all their stripped-down contemporaneity, those fiercely deterministic narratives belonged to the lineage of fictional naturalism—traced back through Richard Wright, perhaps, to elements in Eugene O’Neill and Theodore Dreiser. For such a writer, whose imagination moved in closed circles of victimage, passion and revenge, the question of how to go forward must have presented a challenge. The Healing is Gayl Jones’ answer, offering at once continuity and surprise.

what's immediately familiar is the characteristic immersion in a Woman's voice taking up a story already in progress. In The Healing that voice belongs to Harlan Jane Eagleton, itinerant faith healer with an adventurous past, riding a bus to the small Southern town where she’s scheduled to make her next appearance. However, unlike Eva Canada of Eva's Man, whose notoriety is alluded to here in passing, Harlan doesn't speak in the intense, spare mode of tragic closure. As she reflects on the congregation she is scheduled to meet that evening, her spoken idiom—informally recursive, even chatty—places her closer to the world of comedy.

Of course they’s always three kinds of people there: them that believes without questioning those that believe only when It's themselves being healed, and those who could suck a cactus dry—they ain’t got cactus in this region, but the region I just come from, little town name Cuba, New Mexico—and’ud still tell you it ain’t got no juice in it. I'll tell y’all the truth. If I wasn't the one doing the healing, I'd be among the tough nuts.

(p. 9)

Dressed as she is in blue jeans and a bomber jacket, utterly without social or spiritual pretensions, Harlan understands well the scepticism of some of her hosts. And yet experience has shown her the actuality of her gift, the first proof of which was her own self-healing in a deadly knife attack. Harlan Eagleton, we are to know, is that real, unexplainable thing: the bearer of a power to recognize the sufferers before her, and to heal them.

On this evening, a figure from Harlan’s past turns up in the congregation: Josef, her former lover, whom she met at Saratoga one summer while betting on horses, and who hopes to win her back. After the healing session he speaks to her, and even though Harlan knows that her life has changed beyond his recognition, the encounter propels her into a labyrinth of memory. Through a series of flashbacks, we trace Harlan’s beginnings in the Louisville beauty parlor owned by her mother and grandmother, where her grandmother tells about her years spent playing “Turtle Woman” in a carnival, until she loved a man so much that, as she puts it, “I followed him until I turned into a human being.” These words become a refrain in the book, as the young Harlan marries, then leaves her much-loved husband, Norvelle, out of jealousy over his studies with an African medicine-woman, and travels the world as business manager to a minor rock singer, Joan Savage.

Joan, a flamboyant performer with a cult following, plays a complex role in Harlan’s story. Part soul-sister and mentor, part temperamental genius, part demonic threat, she will ultimately become the catalyst for Harlan’s spiritual accession. A tough challenge for any writer to take on, and Gayl Jones rises to her creation with nerve and a palpable enjoyment. Here is Joan’s first entrance, standing in the doorway watching, while her former husband makes love to Harlan:

She has a handful of yellow hair sticking up, looking like Don King's. She’s wearing faded green gaucho trousers and a bright purple tank top and a purple bandanna, worn like the cowgirls wear. Chewing a pear, she watches us with an air of nonchalance and tepid curiosity like you’d watch reruns on an old TV.

(p. 67)

For drama is Joan’s element, which she not only seeks but creates—even to the perverse extent of setting up this damaging affair.

The magnetism she exerts seems credible, at first. Later, however, as Joan’s sexual jealousy spins out of control, Harlan’s loyalty to her friend and employer becomes a puzzling factor—except as a requirement of the plot. Especially when Harlan is cast as the meek disciple to Joan, whose intelligence her scientist ex-husband claims as “world-class,” the narrative voice stumbles into awkwardness. For instance, just after the scene in which Joan has spied on her ex-husband’s lovemaking, Harlan segues abruptly into an elaboration of Joan’s views on a popular novel:

That novel supposed to be about a colored cowgirl. ’Cept she say that novel ain’t true popular fiction, it just satirizes the popular fiction. She say it uses the techniques of the popular novel to satirize the popular novel, but she also say this Amanda Wordlaw thinks that African-American writers oughta be able to write “the popular novel” and not just the Great African-American Novels. You know, like some book reviewers think that African-American writers are only supposed to write the Great African-American Novel.

(p. 69)

Not that Joan doesn't have a commonsense point—but the break from context in this scene appears merely willed by Jones, thus putting Harlan the narrator-character in a bizarrely false position, as the surrogate speaker, it seems, for another surrogate. Again, in the middle of a scene between Harlan and Josef, Joan’s reported views on race and religion intrude with minimal relevance:

’Cept them original Christians wasn't fair-haired, amongst the Mediterranean peoples. They mythologizes that Christianity. So them Europeans have always been kinda ambivalent about they aesthetics. I don't know whether she read that in one of them nonfiction books. …

(p. 93)

Here, although the jarring mixture of academic and black English may be justified in the speech of a character like Harlan, positioned between disparate social worlds, the narrative logic in the passage remains a problem. So also does the author’s division of the goods of this fictional universe between Joan and Harlan, allocating the domain of intellect to shared, though volatile, friendship between these two women, their dialogue of challenge-and-response, to sustain the central sections of the book. When that falters, and when Jones relies on Harlan’s narrative voice alone, with its unedited veerings into garrulity and laboriousness, I found myself losing track of the writer’s initial vision.

And The Healing does, surely, have a vision at stake. Harlan and Joan are both believers in “the one great love,” embodied for each in the man she originally married. For Harlan, that man is Norvelle; and her transient affairs since leaving him only serve to convince her that she chose rightly the first time. Gayl Jones is telling us here an ultimately benign tale of love guiding a progress into humanity—as unafraid as her fictional writer Amanda Wordlaw of its frankly romantic agenda and the turn from a closed to an open destiny for her characters. Thus Harlan becomes fully human through her quietly learned and sustained commitment to Norvelle, and her loyal service and friendship to Joan. As a mark of that achievement the gift for healing emerges, canceling out Joan’s irrational hatred, and setting in motion Norvelle’s return.

The guiding structure of The Healing, as I read it, is that of classical high romance, in which lovers are separated until a series of ordeals and initiations (as in Parzifal, or The Magic Flute) has prepared them for the transcendent humanity That's celebrated in their reunion. An unexpected move, certainly, for the writer of Corregidora, but in its own way just as bold.