SOURCE: “Faith in Herself,” in Washington Post Book World, Vol. 28, No. 5, March 1, 1998, p. 9.

In the following review of The Healing, Boyd remarks favorably on the novel’s characters and plot but argues that Jones fails to provide enough details.

Like a bright idea, Gayl Jones first beamed onto the American literary landscape in the mid-1970s, when Toni Morrison—then an editor at Random House—introduced Jones's first two novels. Corregidora and Eva's Man both earned glowing reviews.

James Baldwin called Corregidora “the most brutally honest and painful revelation of what has occurred, and is occurring, in the souls of Black men and women.” In praise of Eva's Man, John Updike called Jones “an American writer with a powerful sense of vital inheritance, of history in the blood.” On the heels of such high praise, Jones virtually disappeared from the American literary scene. Walking away from a tenured...