THE SUBSTANCE OF ALL THINGS

Harris’ new novel tells the remarkable life story of a modern-day miracle worker.

Theodore “Theo” Dalton is a therapist who helps his female clients make sense out of their trauma and find spiritual healing. But as readers learn in alternating chapters, before Theo was a healer of psyches, he was a healer of bodies. In 1961, when he was 6 years old, he was in a car accident that crippled his father, maimed his own hands, and killed his pregnant mother—although his infant sister, Lily, was saved. Now, in his adulthood, Theo is reluctant to revisit those memories. “The misfortune of that November night in 1961 is safely locked away,” he thinks, “only rarely peering out—in sepia tones.” When he’s 12 and living in Oklahoma under the care of his father and his imperious Aunty Li, a Native American man named Frank Kotori sees Theo heal another boy’s arm by simply touching it. At Frank’s encouragement, Theo goes on to heal an injured bird, which prompts the man to bring the boy to a sick baby in a nearby part of town: “The current splayed to my fingers, tiny jolts of something,” Theo recalls of holding the infant in his hands, “something charged, even voltaic.” When word of his abilities spreads, some of the townspeople consider him an instrument of evil, and after a string of misunderstandings and tragedies, he decides never to use his hands to heal again. Later, however, his relationships with his therapy patients draw him deeper into his own memories.

Harris, the author of the essay collection Ham (2014), handles Theo’s story with a smooth confidence that belies the inherent difficulties of wrangling a narrative split between two different time frames—a strategy that has brought more than a few other authors to grief. His main narrative gamble is to juxtapose the inherently dramatic developments of the storyline set in the past, involving a boy with supernatural powers and the angry residents of a small town, with the intense but relatively quotidian developments of the present-day story, which focuses on a series of therapy sessions. This gamble pays off well, however, as Harris expertly expands on Theo’s character over the course of the book, and he adroitly plays each plotline against the other to create a gripping sense of narrative momentum. Other characters’ stories also benefit from this gradual unfolding—especially that of Theo’s father, who’s had to live with massive guilt, not only regarding the loss of his wife, but also for a crucial decision regarding Theo’s well-being in the wake of the car crash. The book’s villains, which include childhood bullies and fundamentalist zealots, are somewhat underdeveloped, as is the far more important character of Aunty Li. But the slow, controlled portrayal of adult Theo’s progress toward personal redemption is so commanding that readers will find that such minor flaws fade away as one reads. It all culminates in a series of chapters with hefty emotional impact.

A dramatic and cumulatively powerful tale of one man’s healing.