The Healer

From The Critics

The mining towns of northern Ontario, generally perceived as cold and prosaic locales, are hardly frequent settings for tempestuous literary exploration. But in this oblique, intense novel, the Canadian Shield becomes the setting for a heaving, twisting piece of ersatz Gothic in which an archetypically depressed city boy is swept into the kind of rural netherworld that explains why most urbanites hesitate to wander into unfamiliar diners.

The titular healer is seen mainly through the eyes of a visiting freelance writer. He is both scouting a piece on Caroline, the 20-year-old woman with healing powers, and avoiding his depression following his young wife's recent death.

While he finds the healer, we don't see her do any healing­except of the writer's very personal malaise. Caroline is fighting off her abusive realtor father and his Native American sidekick, a pair of witheringly evil creations. The novel is full of deaths, woundings, car crashes, wilderness, abuse, inhumanity and desperate connections, not to mention the fall-out from a flashpoint locale where good and evil seem to battle more often than the bus comes.

Hollingshead's esoteric and reflexive writing style is neither easy to follow nor a pleasure to read. But by the end of a long haul through a book with considerable thematic pretension, one has developed a considerable (if reluctant) affection for Hollingshead's portentous products of a very cold and disturbed place.
­Chris Jones

Library Journal

When freelance writer Tim Wakelin, posing as a property seeker, arrives in the Ontario mining town of Grant to do a feature on the healing powers of Caroline Troyer, the jaded townspeople easily see through his guise. Wakelin, a recent widower still coming to terms with grief and guilt over the circumstances of his wife's death, is drawn to Troyer, who is troubled by her unexplained powers as well as by her parents' abusive relationship and her father's mysterious hold over her. As Wakelin's interest in Caroline intensifies, so his search for a quiet country property becomes real. Unfortunately, the story shifts from suspense to melodrama after Wakelin purchases a group of cabinets in the woods and must face a marauding bear, swarms of hungry insects, and a feverish escape from Caroline's dangerous father. Nevertheless, Hollingshead (The Roaring Girl, LJ 3/15/97, winner of Canada's Governor General's Award for fiction) writes with breathtaking beauty, and his novel belongs in most literature collections.--Barbara Love, Kingston Frontenac P.L., Ontario

Time Out New York

An eerily original, powerfully distinctive voice.

The Boston Globe

A subtle, ironic storyteller.

The Observer

He has a way of making the ordinary buckle and twist into something quite bizarre.

Abby Frucht

It is in [Tim's] open-mindedness that the grace and unexpected, understated humor of The Healer are revealed...[as he puts] his own grief carefully aside in order to gather around him the prickly sorrows of others.
-- The New York Times Book Review

Kirkus Reviews

Canadian Hollingshead (The Roaring Girl) goes soft and mushy on us with this first novel about a wounded man's search for the healing touch. "With Caroline Troyer I didn't know what I was getting into." That's how Tim Wakelin sees it, with hindsight. Catherine is a healer, a small-town girl whose reputation for miraculous cures has spread across Canada by word of mouth, until it makes its way to the offices of the national women's magazine that Tim writes for. His editors are intrigued, so much so that they give him carte blanche on the assignment: 3,000 to 4,000 words, however he wants to approach it, with as much time as he needs to get the job done. So off goes Tim, straight from the Big City to Grant, the backwoods hamlet where Caroline lives with her parents. Since her father's in real estate, and since Caroline works in his office, Tim pretends to be looking for a cabin in the woods to call his own. Naturally, Caroline is only too happy to show him properties, but as the charade proceeds, Tim quickly realizes two things:(1) she's no fake, and (2) he needs her. Having recently lost his wife, Tim remains racked by grief, barely able to function. So he does indeed move into a cabin, and abandons writing his article-only to get lost in the woods. Now he really needs to be rescued, and guess who saves him? The ending's predictable, as with all morality tales, and the lushness of Hollingshead's prose can be exasperating ("How could she describe to Wakelin or anyone something that could not be contained by her understanding when it was not present, and when it was present could not be contained even by her body?"). But here, in the New Age, we'd rather be healed thancoherent.