A review by readbyrodkelly
The Healing by Gayl Jones
5.0
After reading Gayl Jones's first two novels, Corregidora and Eva's Man, I found myself defaulting to a habit of comparing her work to that of Toni Morrison. There are surely certain stylistic parallels as well as similarly conspicuous themes that the two writers explore brilliantly.
However, it's time for me to put aside the comparison because The Healing is nothing short of extraordinary, and her work in this novel speaks for itself in endlessly inventive and luminous ways. My entire reading experience was punctuated with the question of How?: mainly, how was Jones able to create an entertaining story out of utterly outlandish and disparate narrative threads? The plot set up in the first 40 pages—Harlan Jane Eagleton, a former manager of a D-list rock singer named Joan Savage, has left the music business to travel the world conducting “faith healings”—is merely a frame for a much larger story woven into a picaresque that takes its structural cues from Jazz compositions and black, porch-side storytelling.
The novel is astounding in its scope: Jones riffs on subjects like anthropology, music, philosophy, feminism, black beauty shops, intelligence agencies, racism, sex and sexuality, film, art, gastronomy, scientific theory, literary criticism, and horse racing to create a pseudo brief history or encyclopedia of the Black American experience and all its possibilities.
Jones makes no linguistic concessions or compromises, writing the whole novel in an invented, yet wholly convincing, black dialect. How Jones made this novel work is ultimately not a concern when I consider how rich and deeply felt my joy was in discovering all of its unpredictable delights!
However, it's time for me to put aside the comparison because The Healing is nothing short of extraordinary, and her work in this novel speaks for itself in endlessly inventive and luminous ways. My entire reading experience was punctuated with the question of How?: mainly, how was Jones able to create an entertaining story out of utterly outlandish and disparate narrative threads? The plot set up in the first 40 pages—Harlan Jane Eagleton, a former manager of a D-list rock singer named Joan Savage, has left the music business to travel the world conducting “faith healings”—is merely a frame for a much larger story woven into a picaresque that takes its structural cues from Jazz compositions and black, porch-side storytelling.
The novel is astounding in its scope: Jones riffs on subjects like anthropology, music, philosophy, feminism, black beauty shops, intelligence agencies, racism, sex and sexuality, film, art, gastronomy, scientific theory, literary criticism, and horse racing to create a pseudo brief history or encyclopedia of the Black American experience and all its possibilities.
Jones makes no linguistic concessions or compromises, writing the whole novel in an invented, yet wholly convincing, black dialect. How Jones made this novel work is ultimately not a concern when I consider how rich and deeply felt my joy was in discovering all of its unpredictable delights!