Whirlwind: A Novel

Rating:
Summary: Mother nature's wild ride
Review: Lucas Prouty is a divorced, mid-30's weatherman at a small station in Bentleyville, North Carolina. So far Lucas has avoided loud neckties, plaid suits and cartoon characters, content to do his work without rocking the boat. Suddenly Lucas changes from obscure weatherman to national figure... and all it takes is surviving a hurricane that blows him away before the television audience watching his storm report.

When Hurricane Isabel strikes the North Carolina coast, Prouty is out on assignment, covering the storm with his cameraman. As recently seen with the unprecedented series of Florida hurricanes, the weather forecasters put themselves in incredibly dangerous situations when reporting the ferocity of the weather. Every weatherman's fear comes true for Lucas, who is tossed and battered by the escalating storm, ending up in a dank corner of a demolished restaurant, clinging to life and sanity for nine long days. When he is finally rescued, Lucas suffers a variety of broken bones, but is very much alive.

Life changes drastically after the rescue and the retiring loner, who nurtures a pervasive sadness over a personal tragedy, is forced into a limelight that would tempt any high-achiever. Therein lies the problem: Lucas has not really aspired to the success abruptly thrust upon him, or the fawning new admirers and opportunists who surf the wake of intense media saturation. Amid the material excesses fame affords, the mania of celebrity and an impressive New York job offer, Lucas reaches out to Kiki, a bartender/student back in Bentleyville, the one person who may keep him grounded in reality.

Lucas is the media flavor-of-the-month, his amazing ordeal now part of weather mythology. But when the attention fades, as it will, Prouty will still be a guy on his own with some tough life-decisions ahead. Lucas loves his career, is basically an honest, hard-working man, if a little off track the last few years. In Whirlwind, Jaffe's writing is humorous and insightful, the hapless protagonist thrust from obscurity to the center of media attention. Lucas Prouty is a sympathetic character, with all the human flaws expected in a lonely young man with one foot on the ladder of success and the other in the past, anxious to forecast his own future successfully. Luan Gaines/2004.