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The Healing

3.53 of 5 stars 3.53 · rating details · 85 ratings · 6 reviews

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 Widema

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Hardcover, 283 pages

Published February 3rd 1998 by Beacon Press (first published January 26th 1998)

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Black Caucus of the ALA Award Winners - Fiction

47th out of 104 books — 72 voters

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Jan 04, 2008 Sheba rated it 5 of 5 stars

I know a lot of people won't like Miss Jones. Her style, like Proulx, is unique. She writes as her character thinks: stream of consciousness.

And this particular narrator may not be all that interesting to some. She is a black woman faith healer--and not all that fancy of one. That is, she is gifted, but she sees it as less of a gift and more of a professional skill. There aren't a lot of theatrics to her healing, it's more on the level of the daily--you dig?

Maybe this tells you more about me tha...more

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Jan 20, 2013 Susan Odetta rated it 4 of 5 stars

Not an easy book to read, but worth the effort. At first the rambling stream-of-consciousness style takes a little getting used to. But soon enough the pace and rhythm of the style feel natural and tend to make the story better. Many scattered gems of wisdom are found in the twists and turns of the narrative. Then there's the twist that the story is told backward in time, so the reader has many unanswered questions that are answered in fits and starts, and only finally illuminated at the very en...more

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Jan 05, 2009 Shane rated it 2 of 5 stars

I need to do a speed re-reading of this very odd and challenging book since I'm writing a paper on it for an essay collection; I don't know how I suckered myself into writing this paper when I really don't have much to say about the book!

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Sep 26, 2009 RK Byers rated it 4 of 5 stars

she's a delicious writer.

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Aug 09, 2007 snb rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Wasn't really a fan of this, but I respect the craft.

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Aug 18, 2007 Sara Lamers rated it 3 of 5 stars

A dense book - I need to reread this one.

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About Gayl Jones

After earning the Frances Steloff Award for Fiction while attending Connecticut College, Jones graduated with a Masters in creative writing at Brown University.

The same year, she published her first book Corregidora.[2] She was Associate Professor at the University of Michigan. Ever since leaving that post, Jones has kept her life private in order to concentrate on her writing.[3] Her papers are c...more After earning the Frances Steloff Award for Fiction while attending Connecticut College, Jones graduated with a Masters in creative writing at Brown University.

The same year, she published her first book Corregidora.[2] She was Associate Professor at the University of Michigan. Ever since leaving that post, Jones has kept her life private in order to concentrate on her writing.[3] Her papers are currently housed at the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University.

Gayl grew up in a cramped, dilapidated house with no indoor toilet in Speigle Heights, one of Lexington's more turbulent black neighborhoods. Her father worked late hours as a restaurant cook, while her mother, an aspiring writer, stayed home with Gayl and her younger brother, Franklin Jr. Most weekends Lucille took the children to visit her mother, who lived on a small farm outside town. There the grandmother and mother shared old family tales in the oral tradition of rural blacks throughout Kentucky.

In the mid-60's, the Jones children would have attended the black high school, but Lucille made sure that Gayl and her brother were among the handful of African-Americans enrolling at Henry Clay, the white school known for its academic excellence. Painfully shy to the point of muteness, Gayl seemed almost invisible to other students, although several teachers took note of her. Her Spanish teacher, Anna Dodd, who usually kept her distance from students, often lent Gayl books and talked to her about her adventures among the Paris expatriates in the 20's and 30's.

Just as she soaked up her grandmother's and mother's reminiscences, Gayl absorbed Dodd's. ''I want to write like Henry James,'' she told Sue Ann Allen, her junior-year English teacher, and the final story she turned in was, indeed, written in a Jamesian style. ''The 'central intelligence' was a shell-shocked World War I veteran wandering cafes on the Left Bank,'' Allen recalls. ''I asked Miss Dodd if Gayl got the idea from her. She told me she had talked to her about Paris, but it was clear that the story was created primarily out of her own imagination.''

James was hardly the tradition in which Jones would find her voice. When she went to Connecticut College on a scholarship arranged with the assistance of Dodd's friend Elizabeth Hardwick, the writer and a Lexington native, Jones discovered a literary legacy that was more her own.

The disparity between her background and that of white classmates had been painfully evident in segregated Lexington. ''She grew up in a town with two statues of Confederate generals on the courthouse lawn,'' says Don Edwards, a veteran columnist at The Lexington Herald-Leader who can trace his family to slave owners. ''And then to go from that to the North, Gayl must have felt like an astronaut shot into space.''

Connecticut College, then a small, elite women's school, was another world entirely. Jones landed there during the turbulent 60's, but while other African-American students were demonstrating for more minority admissions and an all-black dormitory, she remained on the periphery, quiet and withdrawn. At the same time, she became engrossed in African-American literature and studied with Robert Hayden, the esteemed black poet and literary historian then visiting from the University of Michigan. Her reading seemed as much a way of defining herself as protests were for others, and when she returned home from college the summer after her freshman year she told her former English teacher of a new project. ''She said she was starting a 'generational novel' based on her family history,'' Sue Ann Allen says.

Graduating with a stellar record, Jones was accepted in 1971 to Brown University's graduate writing program. While the faculty and students were in awe of her talent, many were struck by her silence. She did, however, make friends with a few other black students in the English department, especially Ann duCille.

''Like other students, we(less)

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Quotes from The Healing

“There are things that a woman sings, and only a woman knows the full meaning. You may sing for men as well as for women, but only a woman knows your full meaning. I am not a feminista. I only think a woman should be true to who she believes herself to be. Or who she wants herself to be. Or who she imagines herself to be. I don't know what I mean, or whether I'm true myself to any of that. I don't think there are many of us who are true to our possibilities.
” — 5 people liked it

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