ON THE ROAD TO HEALING

AFTER YEARS OF PUBLISHING MAINLY IN EUROPE, GAYL JONES SPEAKS UP WITH A NOVEL OF IDEAS

Author: By Marcie Hershman

Date: SUNDAY, February 15, 1998

Page: E1

Section: Books

But then Jones fell silent. At least that's how it seemed. In publicity notes for her new novel, ``The Healing,'' Beacon Press director Helene Atwan says that Jones left the United States following ``an incident of racial injustice of a perennial mode,'' to live in self-imposed exile in France for several years. Since 1977, Jones has published fiction only in Germany, and poetry with the Detroit-based African-American publishers, Lotus Press. ``The Healing'' seems, both in story and in fact, aptly titled.

I'm sure there are readers who look to writers to replicate their first works with each new book; I'd like to think I'm not one of them. Yet so vivid was my recollection of Jones's prior fiction that when I opened to the first chapter of ``The Healing'' I kept pulling back from the page. Of course things change in 20 years. Rhythms shift. Jones's ear for voices is still much in evidence, for example, but now it's tuned differently. What in the earlier work was bull's-eye directed and tersely expressed now comes across as expansively detailed and moving in circles away from its subject -- deceptively, of course. Deceptively off-target.

Here are the novel's first sentences: ``I open a can of Spirit of Scandinavia sardines, floating in mustard sauce. The woman on the bus beside me grunts and leans towards the aisle. She's a smallish, youngish, short-haired woman, small Gypsy earrings in her ears, looks kinda familiar, I offer her some of them sardines with one of those small plastic forks and stare out the window.'' With that risky beginning, already nattering away from the novel's traditional reach for a Great First Line, indeed, chattering away from a conventional story line, we're off. We're traveling with faith healer Harlan Eagleton to a little tank town, so called because a water tank is this type of town's most prominent architectural feature, its eponymous billboard for civic pride.

The townfolk have booked her to come and heal them. ``I lay my hands on a young woman suffering from a skin rash, and immediately her skin become smooth and clear as a baby's. A elderly woman suffers from a bone ailment. . . . I lay my hands on and she straightens. . . .'' How did Harlan get such power? To answer that central question, we're spun backward into a stream of testifying, trickery, mystery, and story.

Before Harlan Jane (or Harlan Truth, she claims both tags) was a faith healer, she was the hard-driving manager of Joan Bitch Darling, punk rocker and willful woman extraordinaire. Before Joan took center stage, Harlan made a living betting on race horses. Before hitting the track, she took photographs in Africa with her medical anthropologist husband as they trailed a Masai medicine woman. Before Africa, Harlan was a beautician, taught the trade by her softhearted mother and the grandmother who used to be the ``freakish'' Turtle Woman in a carnival.

Of course, the categories of before-and-after aren't quite that clear-cut. Harlan Jane is, after all, a talker. She can start at point A, recall something about C, twirl twice about B on the way to -- well, who knows until she lands, usually deftly, on both feet. Harlan attracts talkers too, as lovers and friends. The paranoid German-African Kentucky racehorse owner Josef von Fremd; the rocker and novice revolutionary Joan Bitch Darling; Joan's ex-husband (all husbands appear as exes in ``The Healing''), the academic Naughton James; Harlan's own ex, Norvelle; Grandma Turtle Woman -- almost to a one they're ready to hold forth. The momentum of the story line often yields to conversations built upon their mini-monologues. The talk goes 'round in riffs, and, likely as not, ends with a wink. Hidden in the center: a novel of ideas -- about language, about Afrocentrism, about art and literature, about popular culture. ``Joan would say that pop culture's the only true American culture, that the other so-called Culture is just wannabe Europeans. Like in architecture, McDonald's and Taco Bell-type pop architecture, that's more true American culture than the cathedrals. I ain't a culture nut myself, but I think she's got the right idea about modernity. . . . I guess we got our African wannabes like they got their European wannabes.''

Jones has taken on many conventions of oral storytelling -- a repetition of phrases, a relaxed flow of comment, interruption, and ongoing action -- to good effect. Yet, this structuring strategy also has its risks; it assumes the reader will be patient. There were times, especially in the novel's first section, when I didn't want to engage with the distractions and discursiveness in Harlan's talk. But then she got on with it. She got on with her story. She and her friends, enemies, and lovers got on with their entanglements, their sly, salient observations, the sting-like-a-bee aspect of wounding and healing. As the chapters got shorter in length and the pages ahead fewer in number, I got so caught up in the goings-on that I worried Jones wouldn't pull all the chords together. Then came a burst of refugee-run revolutionary activity, out of nowhere. It had to be too much.

I needn't have worried. Taking aim differently, Gayl Jones still hits on-center. With this wily, witty testimony of good and bad faith, Jones triumphantly reenters the fray -- a trickster, a writer, and, with great fortune, a healer.