In brief, Gayl Jones’s The Healing is not a book of many faults. Rather, it’s a book of a few monstrous faults repeated ad nauseum on almost every page. I haven’t read Jones’s other novels such as the lauded Corregidora and Eva’s Man, so, to be fair, I won’t comment on her talent as a whole, but stick to the clichés, ill-wrought dialogue, bloated, pointless description, and intellectual dearth specific to the novel at hand.
At the very least, I know Gayl Jones’s other novels are very different stylistically, which means, if she does lack quality, she might still have some diversity across her work. Thus, it’s probably not so much that Jones is talentless as she is lazy. And perhaps that’s the worst misdeed writers commit. A lack of talent is nobody’s fault and making fun of well-meaning passion is a bit cruel, even if accurate. Pure laziness, however, disrespects both writer and reader – I don’t want, for example, an artist to think me stupid enough to assume there is a reason behind every little miscalculation, the demesne and crutch of bad writers who use bad philosophy to justify bad art. Consider, for instance, the specifics of the plot. Harlan Eagleton, a folk healer, manages a minor but respected rock star named Joan Savage, travels all over the world, has affairs, and offers small observations about pretty much everything imaginable. She is eventually stabbed for “betrayal” by her former rock star. In a way, then, its peculiarities of detail and structure are similar to Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated, but while that book often makes good use of dialogue, irony, humor, and juxtaposition to talk about a familiar subject, the holocaust, in a unique way, The Healing simply drowns in details neither deep nor evocative. I suppose, then, the philosophical justification for such pap is the postmodern obsession with “multiple perspectives,” as Jones, in a way, does just that. She discusses, sometimes for pages on end, every little thing a character says or comes across, but reveals nothing in the process, not in the substance, and not in the construction. In fact, it’s the most obvious fault of the book – its utter pointlessness not only from page to page, but how little it actually says as a whole.
A couple of examples will suffice. The first paragraph, a bit over a page, sets the tone:
I open a tin of Spirit of Scandinavia sardines, floating in mustard sauce. The woman on the bus beside me grunts and leans toward 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, but she grunts and leans farther toward the aisle. I nibble the sardines with one of those small plastic forks and stare out the window. The sun hitting the window makes a rainbow across a field of straw pyramids. There’s a few horses and cows grazing in the meadow, a whitewashed barn and a farmhouse, one of them three-story farmhouses, and there’s one of them little tin-roofed sheds built onto the farmhouse. It looks like one of them painted scenes, you know the sorta landscape paintings you can buy at them flea markets. Or the sort of landscapes that you see on television, where the different artists teach you how to paint pictures. You can learn how to paint pictures in oil or watercolor, and they teach you the secrets of painting and make it seem like almost anyone can be an artist, at least be able to paint pictures in their style of painting…
If you think it’s building up toward some grand metaphor, you’re right. The obsession with sardines is capped by a forced analogy to the Middle Passage to feign depth and to provide a “startling” image that, supposedly, I ought to have never heard before: slaves packed together like sardines. Moreover, look at how uninteresting the actual description is. It’s functional and unpoetic, and while in many contexts this can be done well, there’s no scene or juxtaposition to play off of. The details are simply there. At least the details are somehow used as the novel jumps from point to undeveloped point, from sardines to popular painting, back to sardines, to slaves, to Harlan’s healing, to Moroccan leather, to Gucci, to mosquitoes, to a laundry list of American magazines, to skepticism, and then to “tank towns” – all within 3 1/2 pages, none of it in any way connected, except through the chaos of the narrator’s mind. Elsewhere, Joan is being introduced on stage. The comedian, to get the crowd pumped, goes on for a couple of pages about the word bitch, and why some women hate being called bitches, even if they are bitches, and how his own wife is a bitch, and so on, repeating the word, with no point whatsoever, about 40 times. And so on. Sure, this does reflect reality. People do think and speak this way. But, art is not chaos, nor is it necessarily about reality, at least not in a crude sense. It’s pattern. Realistic situations can arise, but if they are presented in an evocative way, full of irony or juxtaposition or even some insightful commentary, there’s a depth not present in ordinary experience, even if the characters are unaware of the artist’s machinations. Instead, Gayl Jones is manipulated by her own characters. She gives in, lets them run wild, say and do whatever they please, think haphazardly, and lazily jots it all down as a polished product. Frankly, even if you’d strip the novel to its bare essence, there would be little here. No grand idea, no movement to any compelling direction, and just a plot with potential. Yet, it’s notoriously easy to think of a good plot, which is why thrillers are published by the thousands. It’s how you get there, and the deeper stuff revealed, that is art.
Given all of this, the characterization is practically nonexistent. It’s ironic that postmodern books, from the abject trash of Ishmael Reed to the weary stuff of Toni Morrison, although touting their own “density” and “compactness” and “meaning,” by attempting to include as much unrelated crap as possible, are actually the exact opposite. This is because, in such grand ambition to do everything, they really do nothing. No real space is given to develop great ideas, much less complex characters. Harlan is so bogged down by detail, by wanting to say as much as possible, that I can’t even point to any essential characteristics she has, except, perhaps, “calm,” “inquisitive” and a few other traits forced (not developed) out of her by Jones. Harlan, maybe, is loud, and somewhat philosophical, but painfully so, as she never says anything of depth, but bloats her speech with the same fluff Harlan is guilty of. All other characters are minor, but it’s interesting to note how, for the most part, the dialogue swims into itself. Subtract the superficial differences – Harlan’s vernacular, Joan’s cursing, or Josef’s propriety – and you have, at bottom, the same intellectual dearth in every character, except now uncolored by the very things that make it possible to follow dialogue. And, since Jones is of the annoying habit of foregoing quotation marks, these superficial markers are really the only thing you have to go by when you’re trying to figure out who the speaker is.
Finally, whatever ideas Gayl Jones had either disappeared by publication or are poorly executed. Harlan’s Southern vernacular, for example, is mixed with comments on intellectual topics in a way that disrupts the credibility of such a voice. Sure, this kind of inconsistency can be pulled off well enough, especially if other novel details and/or merits necessitate or even excuse it, but when Harlan clearly does not know that Alexandria is in Egypt, and not Morocco, while, in the same book, offering exegesis on post-industrialism and music theory, it’s all a bit much. The intent, obviously, is to champion folk traditions as represented by Harlan, but instead, there’s just mass aesthetic confusion with lots of loose ends and contradictions. As discussions become a bit deeper, whether on racism or relationships, Jones, for the most part, sticks to surface observations evident to any intelligent person. The primary motif, healing, is, despite its importance, barely touched as a motif, although it always comes up, especially on the last page: “And when you discover that you can heal yourself, that you simply put your hand to a wound and it heals, you soon discover you can heal others. First a horse suffering from a fractured phalange, and then a Turtle Woman.” It’s Jones’s way of establishing a continuity of theme and idea, but like in other respects, she fails. It is a forced closure, since there are no real evocative scenes of “healing” in the entire book, no deep psychological changes, no emotional crisis and resolutions, merely statements of what occurs via subdued and ill-wrought poeticisms. And, in an important way, if there is no art, the ideas simply don’t matter, forever static in irrelevance. Art, if not very deep, should at least be technically sound. The Healing is neither.
[This article first appeared on the Cosmoetica website, on 12/27/2009.]
Dear Alex,
What are your credentials for reviewing and analyzing African American literature? This blog post sounds like an accountant attempting to discuss visual art: you simply do not have the tools or awareness to succeed in the endeavor you’ve chosen.
You apply Western reading lenses to African diasporic spiritual writing. You do not understand the novel and, rather than admit that, you claim it is bad writing. Because you cannot see the world the author depicts you reject it. The first paragraph you cite as an example of bad writing performs much more than you are able to see and analyze. In addition, only someone indoctrinated to Western worldviews and belief systems would so callously write-off the opening metaphor to the transatlantic slave trade, the single most important defining event of the modern world–modern capitalism, modern caste systems, modern legal codes that allow for racial and gender exploitation. The novel is about caste and, likely, your position as a white male from Belarus does not allow you the lived experiences to relate to the worldviews depicted in the novel. Healing, I might add, is incredibly important to those of us who are descendants of enslaved Africans and colonized peoples.
Your racism is showing, by the way. You stated that people who speak in Southern vernacular cannot also be intellectual. You should not be writing if you cannot take the time to understand other societies and educational critiques. Southern Black Americans are very intelligent and intellectual, despite being historically denied access to education. Jones chooses to write in specific dialects specifically to combat and subvert the ideas you reinforce: that speech or language determines intelligence. I teach at a Southern (primarily white) university and white, Southern educators here with doctorates also speak with dialects. In addition, scholars who specialize in one field may know nothing about other fields. To criticize Harlan’s knowledge of music (which you would understand if you researched African American culture at all) because she doesn’t know African geography (a subject intentionally omitted from U.S. education) actually reveals your own lack of intelligence and ability to think critically.
This novel is not for you. Neither are the novels of Ishmael Reed or Toni Morrison, which you refer to as trash and “weary stuff”. They could be for you, but you’ve chosen the seat of white supremacy instead of choosing a consciousness of connection, understanding, and belonging. You exhibit a false sense of superiority and the construct of intelligence that is rather merely a mask that fails to hide a vapid, white man occupying the easy position of power.
I see you wrote this a decade ago and hope your thinking has evolved. Good luck and you’re welcome.
Hi Professor J,
What are your credentials for reviewing and analyzing African American literature?
I am a careful reader who reads a lot and writes well on these and other topics, which is the only credential that matters. But since you are a hack academic, I suppose I can share a few others.
As followers of my work know, I got into art primarily through 1) rap music; 2) classic black literature. My life changed at 16 upon reading Eldridge Cleaver’s “Soul on Ice”, and although I don’t think too much of the book now, it still made me realize the world was bigger than me. It usually took me weeks or months to finish a book, whereas I finished this one in 2 days. I was shocked at the experience that I even pretended to be sick for the next 2 weeks and just stayed home reading everything of interest, which was mostly black writing.
I picked up an anthology of Harlem Renaissance poetry later in high school, and was immediately struck by Countee Cullen’s “Heritage”. I knew right away it was a great poem, one of the best ever written, and I wanted to understand WHY I had this impression since I could not quite verbalize my reasons. My head at the time was cluttered with PoMo garbage, and fanciful ideas about the “equality” of one work of art vs. another, whereas Cullen’s poem suggested the opposite. It was clear he truly worked at his craft, had something to say, and said it well. At the time, I had already abandoned my religion, yet noticed that the religiosity of his own writing did not bother me. Indeed, my personal situation did not interfere with appreciating the work, a key lesson later in life.
Here is an old essay I did on the poem: https://alexsheremet.com/on-countee-cullens-heritage/
I was now reading Black Panther literature, Malcolm X, Toni Morrison (not a fan now, but I had read every one of her books at least twice as a teenager), and tons of adjacent writers such as George Jackson. “Native Son” was one of the first novels I recall reading on my own, without being forced to in school. Felt quite sad that I could not get a copy of Huey P’s “Revolutionary Suicide”, as used versions went for $100+ in the mid-2000s and every library in NYC had its copies stolen. “Invisible Man” nicely critiqued my own Marxism at the time from a POV I hadn’t really considered. James Baldwin revealed the heights of the personal essay. Robert Hayden expanded poetry far past the limits of skin or stereotype. WEB DuBois showed that one could be a scholar, but also a craftsman, as “Souls…” still has passages at least a century ahead of its time. (Can you cite them, you nincompoop.)
Since then, I’ve done shows on “Soul on Ice” (it’s the 1996 Ras Kass album which brought me to it, rather than vice versa), 3-4 hour discussions of every single story in Edward P. Jones’s “Lost in the City”, Charles Johnson’s “Oxherding Tale”, and more. You can find my highly positive review of Johnson’s “Middle Passage” on this blog. I plan on doing a Malcolm X bonanza next year, as it’s the 100 year anniversary of his birth.
I’ve since critiqued whiteness, which is but adjacent to blackness, in ways that are novel and out of the norm. Here is an essay from a few months back on the Jewish supremacist Maxim D. Shrayer, who weaponizes his Russian immigrant status as a sob-story to justify killing off Palestinians: https://www.automachination.com/maxim-d-shrayer-post-soviet-fraud/
Here is another on the “white studies” fraud, Robin DiAngelo, who mimics your style of writing and thinking because she likewise has nothing to say: https://alexsheremet.com/white-fragility-white-guilt-robin-diangelo-race/
Have you written anything like this? What HAVE you written? Will anyone remember it, or you, or will you be known simply for getting smacked around over a dumb comment on this blog? Is there a reason why you are dubbed “Professor J” rather than writing under your real name? Are you even PROUD of your work, or of yourself?
Because I prefer to be constructive. I and my co-director just finished a film on an unknown poet from Minneapolis, who dealt with homelessness, drug addiction, and a traumatic brain injury, which he transcended via art. In the coming years, we will do a film on a black poet you’ve never read nor heard of, James Emanuel: the top 2 or 3 black poets of world history, whose work has been entombed by know-nothings such as yourself. One of the great shames of American culture is how great artists such as Herman Melville and James Emanuel are ignored for many decades, thus preventing their influence on said culture. As a result, culture stagnates, and has to play catch-up to their accomplishments as entire generations of readers are starved.
That is my contribution. Feel free to show yours.
You apply Western reading lenses to African diasporic spiritual writing. You do not understand the novel and, rather than admit that, you claim it is bad writing.
I’ve given you plenty of examples of great black writing. The fact that you dismiss artistic standards as “Western” distortion suggests you neither understand art, nor can you intellectually defend your own favorite writing. In short, you have no respect for it, are useless as a critic, and will continue to radicalize those even more ignorant than you.
The first paragraph you cite as an example of bad writing performs much more than you are able to see and analyze. In addition, only someone indoctrinated to Western worldviews and belief systems would so callously write-off the opening metaphor to the transatlantic slave trade, the single most important defining event of the modern world–modern capitalism, modern caste systems, modern legal codes that allow for racial and gender exploitation.
I’ve already cited “Middle Passage”, a book which almost exclusively takes place on a slave ship, as a great American novel. The fact that you can only see SUBJECT MATTER, as opposed to the treatment of said subject, reveals how limited and disrespectful your POV really is. Imagine thinking that the only way a black author can write well is if they talk about your preferred topic. Imagine, too, respecting an author AS AN AUTHOR.
The opening paragraph of “The Healing” is trite, predictable, and lazy. Charles Johnson’s treatment of a similar topic is novel, daring, and the work of a craftsman. That you can’t tell the difference suggests you are forcing every black artist into 1 unpalatable mush purely on account of their skin, irrespective of their accomplishments. In fact, you don’t care about the accomplishment at all, just the veneer of such. What did The Coup say in Big Cats, Bigga Fish — “white folks think blacks be resemblin'”? I guess you are now an honorary white boy.
The novel is about caste and, likely, your position as a white male from Belarus does not allow you the lived experiences to relate to the worldviews depicted in the novel.
Weird how my position as a white male from Belarus allows me to relate to dozens if not hundreds of other artistic artifacts on this same topic, though. It is almost as if I am treating black authors as individuals, while you recruit them into some generalized meat-army for your personal ends.
Your racism is showing, by the way. You stated that people who speak in Southern vernacular cannot also be intellectual.
Outkast has some of the best verses in music. “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” uses Jim’s vernacular to destroy the POVs of its day. William Faulkner and Gayle Jones tap some of the same vernacular, but often veer into shit writing. Hmmmmmmm, almost like color is not the operative thing here?
Southern Black Americans are very intelligent and intellectual, despite being historically denied access to education.
Wow, guess we learn something new every day…
I teach at a Southern (primarily white) university and white, Southern educators here with doctorates also speak with dialects.
America has dialects????? Since when???
This novel is not for you. Neither are the novels of Ishmael Reed or Toni Morrison, which you refer to as trash and “weary stuff”. They could be for you, but you’ve chosen the seat of white supremacy instead of choosing a consciousness of connection, understanding, and belonging. You exhibit a false sense of superiority and the construct of intelligence that is rather merely a mask that fails to hide a vapid, white man occupying the easy position of power.
Feel free to engage with what I’ve written, or, if you have the courage, even share some of your own writing.
Thanks for reading.