"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.

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From Publishers Weekly
Four women endure pain, experience epiphanies and find imperfect but bearable methods to continue their lives in Allison's moving second novel, after the celebrated Bastard Out of Carolina. After Delia Byrd buries Randall Pritchard?father of her 10-year old daughter, Cissy, and guitarist of the rock band Mud Dogs, for which she was the soulful singer?she leaves L.A. and hits the road to backwoods Cayro, Ga., the town she left a decade ago, fleeing her violent husband, Clint Windsor, and abandoning her two baby daughters. In Cayro, she suffers the scorn of most of the community, who condemn her as a sinner and an unnatural mother. Eventually, she strikes a bargain with Clint, offering to tend him on his deathbed if he will allow her to reclaim her daughters Amanda, 15, and Dede, 12, from their stern, Bible-quoting grandmother. The narrative covers the next few years, during which Delia fights poverty, exhaustion, her household's emotional turbulence and the urge to drink. Sanctimonious Amanda pursues moral rectitude with evangelical fervor; sexpot Dede dreams of driving a big truck down the highway; and outwardly tough but vulnerable Cissy discovers peace of mind in spelunking and begins to suspect her sexual orientation. Allison widens her tale to include other members of the community, rendering some hard-faced, cold-blooded rednecks with unsparing honesty. She weaves into the story such themes as female bonding, the power of hate and the puzzle of love, the hard path to forgiveness and acceptance. There are some problems: the teenage girls often speak unconvincingly sophisticated dialogue, and the narrative tends to ramble. Nevertheless, the novel has a restless energy and consistently interesting characters that will keep readers caring about the flawed but valiant women who manage to surmount their private griefs through stubborn determination. 100,000 first printing; BOMC and QPB featured alternates; author tour. Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
For anyone who wondered what Allison would do after Bastard Out of Carolina?a best seller and a literary tour de force?here's the answer. In this second novel, rock'n'roller Delia returns to her roots and the family she abandoned. A BOMC and QPBC featured alternate; with a reading group guide (ISBN Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The New York Times Book Review, Valerie Sayers
This is not a novel interested in formal invention, in ironic distance or even in elegant prose. It doesn't give two cents for post-modern preening or cold intellectual approaches.... It reaches back to the conventions of straightforward storytelling and pays close attention to the way women get by, the way they come to forgive one another, the way they choose who they will be.

The Times, Sarah Harris
Bastard Out of Carolina proved that Allison could write about her own life with almost painful comprehension. Now Cavedweller confirms her as an equally brilliant fictional storyteller.

From AudioFile
Delia Byrd returns home to Georgia from a fast-paced rock-and-roll lifestyle in Los Angeles to reunite with the daughters she had to leave behind. Dean Robertson's voice is perfectly suited for the tones of these Deep South characters. Her voice is at once lilting and gruff, maneuvering through Dorothy Allison's text like a raft on oftentimes turbulent waters. The story is about familial relationships being mended, relationship with the self being forged. Robertson does an excellent job illustrating those and the many other psychological nuances in Allison's novel. R.A.P. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine

From Booklist
Allison's debut novel, Bastard out of Carolina (1992), was a blazing success, and her second, a mama-bear of a book that will send readers deep down into another realm, far from everyday consciousness, is sure to excite the same degree of passion. A premier storyteller working in the rich, family-focused, and secret-filled tradition of southern literature, Allison begins this long, dramatic novel with an arresting short sentence, "Death changes everything," and by the time she wraps up her saga of Delia Byrd and her three daughters, she has charted the course of many births, deaths, and rebirths, both physical and spiritual. Delia's legacy is one of abandonment and violence, a love-poor background that leads her to marry a man who beats her so severely she has to flee for her life, leaving her two baby girls behind. This brands her as a great sinner in the beady eyes of the unhappy citizens of tiny Cayro, Georgia, then, to make matters infinitely worse, she becomes a rock-and-roll star, living the glam life in L.A. But Delia cares nothing for fame, and never stops longing for her daughters, even after having a third, Cissy, and she gives it all up as soon as Cissy's father dies, hightailing it back to Georgia to reclaim her real life. Cissy, the cavedweller of the title and a young character of mythic dimensions on the order of Toni Morrison's Sula, is at the molten core of this mystical tale of blood ties and friendship, madness and love, hard work and grace, and she is something to behold. Donna Seaman

From Kirkus Reviews
An increasingly absorbing story of ``a family in pieces, pulling itself back together out of one woman's stubborn determination,'' by the author of the bestselling Bastard Out of Carolina (1992), a National Book Awardfinalist. In plain impassioned prose enlivened by superbly salty dialogue, Allison gradually discloses the inner lives and secret histories of four bewildered, determined women who eventually come to understand themselves by grappling with the complicated permutations of their mingled fear, hatred, and love of and for their families, husbands, lovers, and one another. Their story begins when Delia Byrd, a rock-and-roll singer whose partner has died in a motorcycle accident, takes their preadolescent daughter Cissy with her across the country on an impulsive mission to reclaim the two other daughters Delia had abandoned a decade earlier when she fled their abusive father, who had all but killed her. The pair's destination is Cavro, Georgia, a closemouthed backwater where Delia, remembered as ``that bitch [who] ran off and left her babies,'' must painstakingly reconnect with her sin- -helping her cancer-stricken husband to die, and submissively biding her time as her girls grow into variously troubled and empowered women. Cissy's older half-sister Amanda is a religious zealot finally softened by her acquaintance with the consolations of ``sin.'' The younger, Dede, works through her ``wildness'' and anger to the possibility of a loving relationship. And Cissy finds in her obsessive explorations of a nearby cave a passageway ``into her dream self'' and the strength to seize her future. All comes together with Delia's stunning revelation of the ``stolen world'' of her childhood--a world that she and hers, through sheer force of will, essentially recover. Allison's breakaway intensity and warm identification with her characters carry this long book triumphantly over its repetitions and overemphases, producing an altogether wonderful second novel and, for its author, a giant step forward. (First printing of 100,000; Book-of-the-Month/Quality Paperback Book Club featured alternate selection; author tour) -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

When Delia Byrd packs up her old Datsun and her daughter Cissy and gets on the Santa Monica Freeway heading south and east, she is leaving everything she has known for ten years: the tinsel glitter of the rock 'n' roll business; her passion for singing and songwriting; and a life lived on credit cards and whiskey with a man who made big promises he couldn't keep. Delia Byrd is headed back to Cayro, Georgia, and for the first time in years, she knows what she wants - the two daughters she left behind a lifetime ago. Cayro, Georgia, is a world of truck farms and convenience stores, biscuit franchises and deep rooted Baptism. And, beneath this surface, caves: lost caves, known caves; caves called "Little Mouth" and "Paula's Lost"; caves where color explodes in the dark and where people have died and been buried; caves waiting to be mapped and explored. Cayro, with its red earth and kudzu, is the only terrain Clint Windsor, the man Delia ran from, and the two girls, Amanda and Dede, have ever known. And when Delia and Cissy reach Cayro, the past unfurls into the present, and Cayro, Georgia, becomes a more complicated place than any of them could have imagined.

SYNOPSIS

When Delia Byrd packs her car and begins the long trip home from Los Angeles—from the glamour of rock 'n' roll, and the darker days of whiskey, violence, and a man's broken promises—she heads to her own unresolved past. Ten years earlier, Delia left the husband who turned on her and abandoned her two daughters. But Delia is pulled back to Cayro, Georgia—to a world of convenience stores and biscuit factories, kudzu and deep-rooted Baptism—to make a deal with the man she paid a high price to leave. Told in the incantatory and unforgettable voice of one of America's greatest storytellers, Cavedweller is a sweeping novel of the human spirit that maps a world of "lost' and "known" caves, the unexplored recesses of the heart, and the lives of four women at a place where violence, and what redeems it, intersect.

FROM THE CRITICS

Dan Cryer

Dorothy Allison wrote the book on dysfunctional families. It was called Bastard Out of Carolina." Sort of The Beans of Egypt, Maine meets Tobacco Road. Allison's take on so-called trailer trash has always been to highlight the real people beneath the stereotypes and the new family configurations with the power to heal when the traditional ones have proved poisonous. Sure enough, her men tend to be good-for-nothing boozers and womanizers (and sometimes batterers) and her women feisty survivors, but they're always fully realized characters, cursed with their very own frailties.

In Allison's new novel, Cavedweller, former singer Delia Byrd forsakes the scene of one screwup -- Los Angeles and its rock-music glitter -- to return to the scene of the original, her Bible Belt hometown of Cayro, Ga. When her rock-star lover is killed in a motorcycle accident, she flees homeward with their love child, 12-year-old Cissy. Determined to put alcoholism behind her and to be reunited with the two daughters she abandoned long ago, she faces a community reluctant to forgive and not just one angry daughter but three.

In a deal to regain custody of Amanda and Dede, Delia agrees to care for her ex-husband, Clint, who's dying of cancer. Once a wife-beater, he's now too weak to lift an arm. Thus is created the most interesting fictional ménage since Michael Cunningham's A Home at the End of the World. Delia, who's sworn off men for the time being, works as a hairdresser and worries that her brood will repeat her foolish mistakes. Cissy and Dede become fast friends. Dede is the teen rebel (a little wild but essentially harmless) and Cissy the wonderstruck observer. Amanda, the oldest, seeks solace in Christian fundamentalism, and right out of high school marries a preacher and is churning out babies for the army of the Lord.

The cavedweller of the book's title is Cissy, who, as she grows into her teens, finds both adventure and comfort in spelunking. The risks of injury and getting lost guarantee adventure; the quiet and womblike engulfment offer comfort. An altogether fitting metaphor for family. The very possibility of love, this book suggests, can scare us to death.

Because Cissy isn't the book's main character -- the whole family takes on this role -- I kept misreading the title as Cavedwellers, a symptom that this novel simply isn't as taut and as sharply focused as its predecessor. Allison assigns all these characters, and minor ones as well, a bit too much to do. (I haven't mentioned the shootings, the genuinely good man, the interracial friendships or the lesbian couple, have I?) But given the tale's extraordinary vitality and wisdom, that's a small price to pay. -- Salon, March 9, 1998

Publishers Weekly

Four women endure pain, experience epiphanies and find imperfect but bearable methods to continue their lives in Allison's moving second novel, after the celebrated Bastard Out of Carolina. After Delia Byrd buries Randall Pritchard -- father of her 10-year old daughter, Cissy, and guitarist of the rock band Mud Dogs, for which she was the soulful singer -- she leaves L.A. and hits the road to backwoods Cayro, Ga., the town she left a decade ago, fleeing her violent husband, Clint Windsor, and abandoning her two baby daughters. In Cayro, she suffers the scorn of most of the community, who condemn her as a sinner and an unnatural mother. Eventually, she strikes a bargain with Clint, offering to tend him on his deathbed if he will allow her to reclaim her daughters Amanda, 15, and Dede, 12, from their stern, Bible-quoting grandmother. The narrative covers the next few years, during which Delia fights poverty, exhaustion, her household's emotional turbulence and the urge to drink. Sanctimonious Amanda pursues moral rectitude with evangelical fervor; sexpot Dede dreams of driving a big truck down the highway; and outwardly tough but vulnerable Cissy discovers peace of mind in spelunking and begins to suspect her sexual orientation. Allison widens her tale to include other members of the community, rendering some hard-faced, cold-blooded rednecks with unsparing honesty. She weaves into the story such themes as female bonding, the power of hate and the puzzle of love, the hard path to forgiveness and acceptance. There are some problems: the teenage girls often speak unconvincingly sophisticated dialogue, and the narrative tends to ramble. Nevertheless, the novel has a restless energy and consistently interesting characters that will keep readers caring about the flawed but valiant women who manage to surmount their private griefs through stubborn determination.

Library Journal

In 1981, Delia Byrd leaves behind the California life of fame and misery she found at the top of the record charts and the bottom of a bottle to return home to Cayro, GA. Cissy, her young daughter, who is grieving for her newly dead father, crazed rocker Randall Pritchard, wants no part of this new life. Now Delia is trying to put together a life and reacquaint herself with the two older daughters (one a hellion, the other a religious zealot) she abandoned ten years earlier when she fled her murderous husband, who stonewalled all of Delia's attempts to obtain legal custody. Shunned by family and community, Delia struggles mightily with sobriety and three unforgiving, hostile offspring. Her remarkable stoicism as she attempts to carve out a new low-key, rock-solid security for herself and her children is nothing short of heroic. Allison's (Bastard Out of Carolina, LJ 3/1/92) powerful elegance puts the lives of these four women right into the face of her readers as she charts their touching, flawed efforts to construct a workable if unconventional family unit. Highly recommended. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 11/1/97.]Beth E. Andersen, Ann Arbor Dist. Lib., MI

Valarie Sayers

Cavedweller sounds inventive and rhythmic; though there are still scenes in which the language is workaday, there are also passages of luminous power and several strong metaphors -- journeys and car wrecks and caves --that give the novel a broad shapeliness....Allison is especially good at depicting real women facing real poverty....This is not a novel interested in formal invention, in ironic distance or even in elegant prose. It doesn't give two cents for post-modern preening or cold intellectual approaches. It reaches back to the conventions of straightforward storytelling and pays close attention to the way women get by, the way they come to forgive one another, the way they choose who they will be. -- New York Times

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