The Healing.

Another writer capable both of imagining the real and of giving life to language as people speak it--in this case Southern black English--is Gayl Jones, author of The Healing. The publisher, Beacon Press (1998), advertises The Healing as the book that convinced it to publish fiction for the first time in its nearly 150-year history. The press made a good choice.

Toni Morrison, at the time an editor at Random House, published Jones's first novels, Corregidora and Eva's Man in the 1970s. James Baldwin, John Updike, and Maya Angelou hailed Jones as a major literary talent. This is her first novel published in the United States since then. (The Healing appeared in bookstores shortly before Jones's husband barricaded their house in a confrontation with police over a fifteen-year-old conviction for weapons possession. He killed himself by slitting his throat when the police broke in. Shortly afterwards, the police sent Gayl Jones to a state psychiatric hospital, saying she was suicidal. Those events have unfortunately overshadowed Jones's achievement in her latest book.)

The novel's main character is Harlan Jane Eagleton, an African American woman from New Orleans, an autodidact, and a faith healer. She is an expansive character, who tells her story in all directions. She begins near the end with her work as a popular healer, then moves backwards into stories of two less-than-satisfying love affairs and the eccentric tales of her grandmother. Harlan also recounts her life as manager of a rock star named Joan and explores their sometimes affectionate, sometimes angry fascination with each other. And Harlan provides meditations on her much-missed husband, an anthropologist, whom she left behind in Africa when he became obsessed with a tribal medicine woman. These stories all come together at the moment when Harlan heals her own body--the mysterious occurrence that gives her the power to help others.

This is an intricate, fascinating character whose ruminations, impulses, and relationships make for a great read. And, despite its complicat observations on pain, in the end the novel offers comfort.

Anne-Marie Cusac is Managing Editor of The Progressive.