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T A B L E__T A L K

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R E C E N T L Y

Lady Macgrunge
By Michelle Goldberg
"Kurt and Courtney" paints a horrific picture of Courtney Love as manipulative, power-mad and possibly murderous
(02/25/98)

How do you spell Yiddish?
By Lee Dembart
A legendary Yiddish newspaper is changing its spelling -- and therein lies a tale of Talmudic proportions
(02/24/98)

Stop the millennium -- I want to get off
By Virginia Heffernan
As the year 2000 approacheth, so doth a Biblical plague of special issues of news weeklies
(02/23/98)

Earth to Mars and Venus
By Mary Beth Williams
Relationship guru John Gray's syrupy new mag
(02/20/98)

Looking for some company
By James Surowiecki
Tripod + Lycos: In search of community
(02/19/98)

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BROWSE THE
MEDIA CIRCUS
ARCHIVES

WHY DID A BRILLIANT NOVELIST'S LIFE SPIRAL INTO OBSESSIVE HORROR?

BY SALLY ECKHOFF | The last lines in "The Healing," the new novel that marks Gayl Jones' return to literary prominence after more than 20 years of mysterious absence, are charged with anticipation. The protagonist, a woman named Harlan Jane Eagleton, has been all over the world, mastered an incredible array of skills and is about to reach a crossroads. She knows that in the room she's about to enter, someone is waiting, someone from out of her past she desperately wants to see. "But the man standing here is the last man in the world I expected to find. Or maybe the first man I'd hoped for."

"The Healing" leaves readers teetering, leaning out to catch the news that its heroine will finally get her wish. Surely, it seems, something heavenly must be swimming toward the author's grasp as well: This book, the first of hers to be seen in the United States since her 1977 novel "Eva's Man," has been roundly praised by a new generation of critics and deemed "a major literary event" by Newsweek.

But there have apparently been dark clouds massing in Jones' life for longer than any of her admirers, old or new, could have imagined. And last Friday, in Lexington, Ky., in a small, water-streaked green house surrounded by a chain-link fence, they burst.

At the enigmatic center of Jones' tale stands her husband, Bob Jones. Bob Jones, who had a long history of bizarre behavior, had become increasingly unhinged. He had recently started threatening people through the mail, and insisted he had a gun. Acting on a 14-year-old assault warrant on the novelist's husband, the police came calling. They found the Joneses barricaded in their little cottage with the gas turned on. After three hours, having ascertained to their satisfaction that the man inside was unarmed, the police burst in. They couldn't have seen the knife. The novelist's unfortunate husband, the man she had given up her career to follow and protect, slit his own throat. He died later that day. She was taken to a state mental hospital because authorities believed her own suicide was imminent. When she will be released is not yet clear.

There's little information available about Jones. Her junior and senior high school yearbooks have no pictures of her. According to her teachers, she was brilliant but painfully shy. Sue Ann Allen, her English teacher at Henry Clay High School in 1966, remembers, "When other kids were just messing around, she'd say, 'I want to write like Henry James.'" Jones went to Connecticut College and got a Ph.D. from Brown. Later, at the University of Michigan, Professor Wendy Steiner taught with her. "I remember one time saying hello and she actually looked up and smiled at me," Steiner told Newsweek before Jones' world fell apart, "and I thought it was an incredible development." In her new book, the space on the book jacket where the author photo goes is ominously empty. Jones refused to talk on the phone to anyone, not even her own publisher. She communicated through e-mail. She and Helene Atwan, the director of the Beacon Press in Boston, which published "The Healing," never had a single conversation.

The New York Post unearthed a photo to use along with their horror coverage, a Jill Krementz publicity shot that presumably graced the cover of one of Jones' first, celebrated works. Jones looks wide-eyed and very young, a printed cloth wrapped around her head. She's pixielike and rather gorgeous.

N E X T+P A G E+| The trouble begins