Cavedweller
Brilliance, $23.95
Nova Audio Books, $17.95
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REVIEW BY LAURIE PARKER
Since her explosive debut with Bastard out of Carolina, Dorothy Allison has been spinning stories that linger in the memory like dust hanging in the air of an abandoned house -- haunting, evocative, both familiar and disturbing. Her characters, especially her women, are the modern-day exemplars of Faulkner's belief that man (and woman) will not only endure, but will prevail. Her latest novel, Cavedweller, introduces a family of women who may seem as different from each other as is humanly possible, but who are inexorably joined by the bond of family. Delia Byrd left two infant daughters, an abusive husband, and an entire life behind when she climbed aboard Randall Pritchard's tour bus back in 1971. Ten years later, the band has broken up, Randall is dead, and Delia finds herself struggling to stay sober and raise her third daughter in the foreign land that has become her home, Los Angeles. But Randall's death raises some old ghosts for Delia, so she loads Cissy into the back of a battered Toyota and heads east to find what is left of her family. Cayro, Georgia, is an unforgiving town. Delia is seen as a fallen woman, an "unnatural mother," one who abandoned her babies to take up with a "hippie singer." She is denied access to her two older daughters, Amanda and Dede, by their grandmother and is shunned by the people who watched her grow up. So Delia makes a deal with the devil -- she agrees to care for her ex-husband, Clint, as he dies of cancer. In exchange, he will get the girls back from his mother, and, upon his death, they will live with Delia. It is in the house of that dying man that Delia and Cissy get to know Amanda and Dede, and there that Delia attempts to make a family from the scattered shards of her past. Allison understands the anger that a teenage girl can harbor in her heart, the fierceness of a mother's love, and the way that love can wear away the walls a daughter erects around herself. With patient and craftsman-like skill, Allison builds lives for these women, fleshing out their personalities, revealing their fears and faults, and binding them together in a novel of consummate grace and beauty. Laurie Parker lives and writes in Nashville, Tennessee.
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