More heartfelt tales from the neighborhood

FICTIONAL settings often involve an invented community superimposed on an actual location, with the name sometimes changed to protect the privacy (or guilt) of the inhabitants. And while Thomas Hardy’s Wessex or Anthony Trollope’s Barsetshire remind us the technique is not new or exclusively American, some of the more memorable examples that come to mind are from the American South -- most famously William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County standing in for Lafayette County, Miss., but also Jan Karon’s Mitford, modeled on Blowing Rock, N.C., or Tina McElroy Ansa’s Mulberry evoking Macon, Ga. Add to that list Pearl Cleage, whose use of the historic West End district of Atlanta provides the rich backdrop for her fourth novel, “Babylon Sisters.”

Cleage’s West End is a black progressive/feminist paradise -- a combination of real-life independent bookstores, iconic restaurants of the civil rights movement, barbershops, wig palaces and residential streets where the men are respectful and the women can walk at night unafraid. But the West End has also had its share of crime, cleaned up in large measure by local businessman and unofficial neighborhood enforcer Blue Hamilton, whose exploits and romance with Regina Burns took up a good part of Cleage’s third novel, “Some Things I Never Thought I’d Do.”

While a lingering presence, Blue, Regina and their friends have ceded the spotlight to 38-year-old Catherine “Cat” Sanderson, owner of Babylon Sisters, an agency whose mission is to help female refugees and other immigrants adjust to life in the U.S. “Atlanta is a magnet for people trying to make a new start in a new country,” Cat tells us, “and even though the town’s natives still think in terms of black and white, in reality we’re looking more and more like the Rainbow Coalition.”

But although helping Cambodian, Cuban and Haitian families find safe housing or good schools is deeply satisfying, neither Cat’s work nor a small inheritance will cover her daughter Phoebe’s tuition at Smith College. Even worse, the 17-year-old, brokenhearted after breaking up with her boyfriend, has determined that finding her birth father will help her understand men and the choices she’s made in her young life.

That quest spells trouble for Cat, who has assiduously kept his identity a secret from everyone except her best friend and Phoebe’s godfather, Louis. She hasn’t been trying to shield the girl from some ne’er-do-well. It’s just that the girl’s father, Burghart “B.J.” Johnson, a foreign correspondent living in Africa, knows nothing of her existence. He thinks Cat had an abortion after he left for Africa during their senior year in college. And for her own reasons, Cat has constructed an elaborate network of stories backed up by carefully forged diaries of her sexual “exploits” to throw her daughter off B.J.’s trail.

But when Phoebe takes the diaries back to her boarding school and starts contacting the innocent men mentioned in their pages with a request to take a DNA test, Cat realizes she’s going to have to stop lying and come clean to both Phoebe and B.J. “A lie is never the best you can do, even when you tell yourself it is,” she muses. “It’s just a way of buying some breathing room until you can work up enough courage to tell the truth. And that can take a lifetime.”

Unfortunately, Cat doesn’t have that long. She’s helping a Haitian refugee locate her missing younger sister and, to build that college nest egg, she’s just taken on a huge project helping Ezola Mandeville, a former maid who has gone on to start her own multimillion-dollar training and job placement company for female janitors. After hearing how Mandeville founded her business after being moved by the story of the forgotten black woman murdered by Bigger Thomas in Richard Wright’s “Native Son,” Cat agrees to help her reach out to immigrants.

So when B.J. returns to the West End, wanting to make amends with Cat and work with Louis’ struggling black newspaper on a series of stories about a ring of Miami sex slavers, “Babylon Sisters” kicks into high gear, moving between the reawakened romance between Cat and B.J., a growing love affair between Louis and Cat’s neighbor Amelia, corporate intrigue, social activism and domestic truth-telling that manages to be funny, moving and suspenseful at the same time.

Cleage’s ability to blend the personal and political in a female-centered story that entertains while it educates is consistent with the values that permeate all of her novels, whether set in the West End of Atlanta or the black community of Idlewild, Mich., where two of her earlier novels took place. And although regular readers of suspense novels might see some plot twists telegraphed a little too clearly, the knowledge does not diminish the joy of spending time with the engaging Cat and her loved ones in a place filled with “health and peace and love and family and a community where you can wave at your neighbors and they wave back.”

We should all be so lucky.