The Healing.

In the '70s, with the publication of her novels Corregidora (the story of Ursa, a blues singer who owes her birth to a series of violent rapes) and Eva's Man, (about a woman's psychological and physical imprisonment in a hospital for the criminally insane), Gayl Jones, discovered and edited by Toni Morrison, was both hailed as a new voice in fiction and condemned for her raw language and sexual violence. In Eva's Man, the protagonist is imprisoned after poisoning her lover and castrating him with her teeth. In Corregidora, Ursa is pushed down a flight of stairs by a jealous lover; she miscarries and is made infertile by the brutal fall. Both novels, driven by dialogue, rely on what Jones once described as "language as heard" rather than "language as written." Using the patterns of the blues, this language was often explicitly violent, sexy, and heartbreaking as it chronicled a complex story of the intergenerational impact of the sexual violation of black women.

After a twenty-year hiatus, Jones has returned with a surprisingly subtle novel about the many ways humans, particularly women, mislead and mistrust one another and smaller events bruise. The Healing is the story of Harlan, a minor rock-star manager and gambler turned faith healer, who has recently returned from Africa, where she has left a straying husband. Back in the States, Harlan begins her own affair with Josef, a wealthy Afro-German living in Kentucky, who keeps a paranoid vigil over his four-hundred acre thoroughbred ranch, surrounding the land with guards and surveillance equipment.

Creeping into the middle of the book is the story of Harlan's grandmother who, for a while, was a Turtle Woman in a sideshow where the Unicorn Woman was the star: "A lot of people when they would see that sign advertising the Unicorn Woman, they'd think she a white woman, you know, 'cause all the unicorns in the storybooks is white. . . ."

The two sideshow acts become bookend metaphors for womanhood: Unicom Woman is the ideal, compared to Lena Horne (although others say "that even if she a real Unicorn Woman, she still a fake one, just by virtue of being colored"). Turtle Woman, who dons a fake shell each morning, is not the ideal; she is thought of as "one of them freakish women" by the male patrons, and leaves the carnival for the first man who sees her as a real woman. As a writer, of course, Jones has worn her share of turtle shells, entered and left and reentered the sideshow of the literary scene, always remaining an extremely private person. Her current editor, having never met her, downloaded The Healing off the Web.

Driven by narrative rather than dialogue, this contemplative and muted novel concerns itself with the authentic confronting the imagined, though we are never clear about the "realness" of the Unicorn Woman's horn, the justifiability of Josef's paranoia. While the call-and-response patterns of the blues remain (A light urging, I said./ A little light urging, not too much, said the groom./ The jockey should ride with her, let her pull, I said./ Yeah, the jockey should let her lead. Let her lead, said the groom.), the narrative is more wayward, the sexual intonations couched in metaphor, the sex itself happening off the page.

Even the violence is almost gone. When one character, in a fit of rage, attempts to stab Harlan, the knife bends against what Harlan perceives to be bone inside her chest. Pressing her hand against the wound, Harlan heals herself. "And when you discover you can heal yourself," she reflects, "that you simply put your hand to a wound and it heals, you soon discover you can heal others." With The Healing, Jones clearly intends to do just that.

Jacqueline Woodson is the author of Autobiography of a Family Photo.