The Healer

January 4, 1999
Canadian author Hollingshead's introspective American debut novel has all the rueful dysfunctionality of his well-received short story collection The Roaring Girl (which won the 1995 Governor General's Award for Fiction), but less of its irony and little of its humor. The title character, Caroline Troyer, is a young woman from rural Canada whose inexplicable curative powers have attracted the notice of 32-year-old journalist Timothy Wakelin, who comes to the remote mining town of Grant, Ontario, to meet her. Wakelin is not on the track of a tabloid story so much as in pursuit of some soul-searching after the death of his wife. Troyer, paradoxically, is a faith healer without faith, close to despair herself underneath her rural stoicism. Her abusive, worldly father, Ross, gradually tips over the edge of sanity, complicating the burgeoning but uneasy relationship between his daughter and Wakelin. Overall, Hollingshead's talent for characterization and low-key drama gets stretched too thin by a meandering plot and self-conscious writing. Wakelin's and, later, Caroline's refuge in an isolated farmhouse is the scene of much ruminative tedium as Hollingshead indulges their melancholia. His prose here and elsewhere gets clogged with metaphors and metaphysics that impede the narrative flow. Ultimately, Hollingshead fails to resolve his characters' emotional crises, as the action peters out with an anticlimactic confrontation with Caroline's "devil daddy" in the wilderness.