Cavedweller
by Dorothy
Allison
"Death
changes everything." So begins Dorothy Allison's sprawling,
ambitious, and deeply satisfying second novel, Cavedweller.
For Delia Byrd, Randall Pritchard's death in a motorcycle accident
launches a journey of several thousand miles and almost two
decades, a rebirth of sorts that's also a return to her roots.
Years before, the handsome but untrustworthy rock star Randall
helped Delia flee an abusive husband; Delia escapes physical
danger but leaves her two small children behind. In California,
her abandoned daughters haunt her dreams and preoccupy her waking
hours, even as she sings in Randall's band and gives birth to
another daughter, Cissy. But when Randall is killed in a
motorcycle accident, Delia packs rebellious Cissy into a
broken-down Datsun, bound for Cayro, Georgia, and the one thing
that suddenly matters more than anything else: her abandoned
children and the chance to be a mother to them once again.
Cayro's poverty is emotional as well as
material; the town is a hard place, full of hard people. To them,
Delia will always be "that bitch" who abandoned her
babies, "that hippie" living a life of sin. Nonetheless,
Delia forges a cruel bargain with her former husband: in exchange
for Delia's agreeing to care for him as he dies, he gives her a
chance to reclaim her daughters. Like Bastard
out of Carolina, Allison's acclaimed debut novel, Cavedweller
is a chronicle of rage, strength, and survival. Here, however,
Allison is equally concerned with the redemptive power of love and
forgiveness, and a novel that began with death ends on an
unexpectedly sanguine note: "'Yes, it's time for some new
songs.'" There are no victims in Dorothy Allison's work;
Delia triumphs through sheer force of will, bringing her family
together despite the contempt of almost everyone around her.
The novel has its flaws--including occasionally
flat-footed prose--but it is in the end compulsively readable, and
it's populated by some of the most memorable characters in recent
fiction: tough, prickly, flawed, and deeply human, Delia and Cissy
are literary creations of the first rank. In describing the
complicated emotions that bind and divide them, Allison
demonstrates a profoundly unsentimental understanding of the way
the human heart works. Cavedweller is the work of a mature
artist, her best fiction to date.
