Book Review: Healing Lily by D. Stephenson Bond

When a man is closed, there is always a reason. His heart, even the most timid heart, does not turn away from the world for reasons of its own. He is not by nature uninterested, but unnaturally wounded. And if you think that merely attention and desire will draw him out again, then you do not understand the injury that a woman can inflict upon a man’s soul. It is not a little thing. Some harms can never be undone.

But then again, the once-bitten, twice-shy victim of circumstance and off-course romance in D. Stephenson Bond’s fastidiously-tuned Healing Lily is a Jungian psychoanalyst who should have the wherewithal and know-how to heal thyself, to bounce back with resilience and aplomb by drawing upon many of Carl Jung’s psychological concepts and theories as alluded to throughout the novel – individuation, anima, archetype and synchronicity. But it’s an abstract and academic application of conjectures for Dr. Daniel Osgood, much in the same way the Beacon Hill, Boston resident has tenuously opted for the “shadow side of love” – from the shallow end of the pool of experience he splashed in, for “a libido attachment” as he calls it in all seriousness, so many years ago.

Furthermore, as he’s climbing into his mid-50s — but seemingly never out of his incapacitating and pathetic Mama’s boy passivity — the currently down on his luck Daniel is getting long in the tooth while stuck in stasis in his starry-eyed naïveté. Indeed, he's been caught up in his yesterdays – where “the past was close behind,” as Bob Dylan sang, by secretly-held and deeply ingrained psychological reasons. But you have to let the past overtake you; Daniel had to confront his preoccupations, then allow the groundwork to solidify: “Sometimes things have to be prepared in the inner life long before they are ready to bear the weight of living them in outer life.” After a total of 12 years of analysis Daniel was “as prepared as a man can be to face his deepest fear: fear of love is fear of life.”

Cue the present, cue the future, cue Lilly: levelheaded 9/11 widow and blue-collar budding singer/songwriter with, understandably, some emotional baggage (and a gratuitous “L”), who stumbles into Daniel’s life when neither thinks the time is right for a relationship. And prompt the sprains and strains of Football games and Classical strings: Each finds that something’s gotta give in the way of easier-said- than-done compromises and the conflicts to be found in big-lug brotherly hugs and standoffish habits dying hard.

Article Author: Gordon Hauptfleisch

Gordon Hauptfleisch is a Blogcritics Books Editor, freelance writer, and book reviewer for San Diego Union Tribune Books (R.I.P.). For many years he worked in and managed bookstores and record stores, and most recently was purchasing manager for San Diego Technical Books. …

Visit Gordon Hauptfleisch's author page — Gordon Hauptfleisch's Blog