TEMPEST RISING
By Dianne McKinney-Whetstone
Morrow, 280 pages, $24
If home is indeed where the heart is, then, for the inhabitants tumbling to their destiny in Dianne McKinney-Whetstone’s luxuriant new novel, “Tempest Rising,” home is Heaven.
Not heaven–as in the sweet-by-and-by, pie-in-the-sky, happy-hunting grounds where the Almighty is presumed to reside. Rather, for Clarise and Finch, living the good life of the upper black class in the 1950s and early ’60s, their grand, three-story Philadelphia house is such paradise on Earth that they dubbed it Heaven. And lest anyone forget, they remind folks every chance they get–from the mailbox to the welcome mat to the monogrammed towels in their bathrooms.
Life is too, too, perfect–from Clarise’s exotic, “half-white African” beauty that “begged for mink and silk,” to Finch’s thriving catering business, to their three daughters–“nice, non-snobbish girls despite the opulence of their lifestyle”: Bliss, Victoria and Shern.
Love is ripe in their lives, a palpable presence. Until, that is, Finch’s business fails. He disappears and is given up for dead, Clarise has a sedative-induced nervous breakdown, and the girls, hovering at the cusp of adolescence, are whisked into the Dickensian foster home of the money-mad Mae. Clarise and her girls go from blossoming in Heaven to living in hell.
With her 1996 debut novel, “Tumbling,” McKinney-Whetstone captured the attention of a publishing world enthralled with the commercial promise of black women’s literature. It has been said that she occupies the uncrowded middle ground of the popular canon of black women writers, hanging out between the densely high-brow literature of Toni Morrison and the sister-girl school of popular fiction of Terri McMillan. But while McKinney-Whetstone’s writing, with its eccentric characters and lush narrative, sometimes nods at Morrison’s influence, such a characterization is a trifle pat. Moreover, it misses the point, reducing her work to a mere racial characterization–much like describing Spike Lee as “the black Woody Allen.”
Clearly, McKinney-Whetstone is her own writer. “Tempest Rising,” her second novel, sparkles with outrageously human characters. There is Clarise, whose father is rumored to be an Italian from around the corner where she grew up. There is Mae’s daughter, the bitter and beautiful Ramona, her heart crippled by years of her gambling mother’s abuse. There is Tyrone, Ramona’s straight-up, true-blue man, temporarily held in the sexual thrall of the town floozy. And there are the girls, feisty little prewomen hellbent on going home to Heaven.
But no one leaves as indelible an imprint as Clarise’s “parents,” the two aunts and two uncles–all of them her mothers’ siblings–who raised her:
“(T)he sisters were the type who always bought their pork whole and fresh-killed from the waterfront, drained it, skinned it, hacked it into ham and rump and chops. . . . The brothers were soft, immaculate, and artistic; they kept spotless bureaus and chifforobes, played the melody harp, cooked like the French.”
The novel is best in its beginnings, where McKinney-Whetstone lets her characters run free, painting them lovingly with lush prose and a sly, wink-wink-nudge-nudge wit:
“(T)he aunts . . . had watched Clarise’s strong-natured mother die a hard death from female problems: a growth, a ruptured vessel, a massive bleed, according to the doctors; too many lying men with their tainted naked things getting too close to their trusting baby sister, according to the aunts. They told Clarise what to look for when her own nature came down. Told her to run like hell from any man who said, `Baby I’m for real.’ Told her she’d do well to marry young.”
Unfortunately, the latter half of the book is hobbled by overzealous plotting. Shern, Bliss and Victoria are forced to live with the saccharine sweet yet evil Mae while Clarise struggles to regain her sanity and save her girls. Here the characters become blurred, lost in a swirl of heavy-handed machinations: a 20-year-murder mystery, an escape from a mental institution, an apparent kidnapping. Perhaps most lamentably, the aunts and uncles virtually disappear from the action.
Still, “Tempest Rising” has much to offer: empathetic, evocative writing, behind which lies the kind and knowing heart of a talented novelist.
