Cavedweller [Hardcover]

Dorothy Allison (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 1, 1998

When Delia Byrd packs her car and begins the long trip home from Los Angeles-from the glamour of the rock 'n roll business, her passion for singing and songwriting, and the darker days of whisky and violence and too much belief in the promises of a man she loved-she heads to Cairo, Georgia, and her own unresolved past. Ten years earlier, Delia left the husband who turned on her, abandoned her two daughters, one an infant, and fled to California. But Delia is pulled back to 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. She brings her third daughter, Cissy, with her. And as the lives of Delia, Cissy, Amanda, and Dede converge, Delia's past uncoils into the present with a ferocity that brings all four women to terms with themselves and with one another. 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. * Bastard Out of Carolina was a National Book Award Finalist and a national bestseller.
* The critically acclaimed film adaptation of Bastard Out of Carolina, directed by Angelica Houston, was broadcast on Showtime in 1996 and is now available on videocassette.
* Cavedweller is the long-awaited, greatly anticipated second novel from a beloved author with a strong and loyal audience.
* The Plume edition of Bastard Out of Carolina averages 6,000 copies in sales each month.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

"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.

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.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 434 pages
• Publisher: Dutton Adult; 1ST edition (March 1, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0525941673
• ISBN-13: 978-0525941675
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.3 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (66 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,287,955 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Dorothy Allison is the bestselling author of several novels including Bastard Out of Carolina, Cavedweller, and Two Or Three Things I Know For Sure. The recipient of numerous awards, she has been the subject of many profiles and a short documentary film of her life, Two or Three Things but Nothing For Sure.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Why did it take me so long to read this book??, April 25, 2003

By 

Peggy Vincent "author and reader" (Oakland, CA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Cavedweller: A Novel (Mass Market Paperback)

Years and years ago, I devoured Bastard out of Carolina. Then I got ahold of Cavedweller - and it might as well have dwelt in a cave itself for all the notice I took of it. Why did it take me so long to pick it up and read it?
Answer: the cover photo was ambiguous and didn't draw me in, and the title was...odd.
What a mistake! I picked it up while cleaning out bookshelves a few days ago, flipped to the first page, and barely put it down till I'd finished it. It begins with death, and death (or the threat of death - many near misses) persists throughout. But somehow the women of this book triumph above poverty, narrow-minded neighbors, small town pettiness, Holy Roller invective, no-good men (though, to Allison's credit, there ARE a few good men), and lack of opportunity.
I admire the author's ability to move seamlessly forward in time without her readers demanding to know absolutely everything that happened in the intervening years. Characters grow and learn and change, and Allison's writing plops us down at the critical moments so we can observe first-hand the events that caused the transitions.
Wonderful book, wonderful characters, wonderful writing.
Highest recommendation, right behind Bastard out of Carolina.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars This novel changes protagonists faster than Melrose Place!, May 26, 1998

By 

Jill Dyche (Los Angeles, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Cavedweller (Hardcover)

I, too, must have missed something here. While the first several chapters definitely had me hooked, I found the rest of the book slow going. Most of the characters, but especially Delia, were only partially-drawn, and each seemed to be keeping a BIG SECRET that never emerged. There is a lukewarm family drama described in retrospect toward the end of the book that could be considered expository, but it seemed like an author's afterthought, and didn't work at all.

The whole cave thing was too little, too late, and the fact that it dictated the book's title surprised me. I was most frustrated with how Allison takes us deep into a character, and then pulls back, as if teasing us with detail that is ultimately inconsequential. The most fascinating characters, Rosemary and Amanda, are dangling like rag dolls at the end of the story.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars DISARMING CANDOR AND LYRICAL PROSE, December 14, 2004

By 

Gail Cooke (TX, USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (COMMUNITY FORUM 04)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Cavedweller (Hardcover)

Echoing the voices and revisiting the region of her starkly splendid debut novel, Bastard Out Of Carolina, Dorothy Allison sets her story of family, friendship, and redemption, Cavedweller, in rural Cayro, Georgia. This community with its myopic mores and entrenched culture is as much a part of her tale as the gritty, determined women who call it home.
With disarming candor and often lyrical prose Ms. Allison relates the story of Delia Byrd, who fled Cayro for Los Angeles a decade ago, running from an abusive husband, Clint Windsor, and leaving behind two baby daughters. Delia became the whiskey-voiced, whiskey dependent lead singer for a rock group called "Mud Dogs." When her second husband, guitarist for the group and father of her third daughter, Cissy, dies in a fiery motorcycle crash, Delia packs a few belongings plus her protesting daughter into an enfeebled Datsun and heads for home. Determined to stay sober and reunite her family, she drives cross-country "as if her sanity depended on it."

There are no welcome home signs in Cayro. Recognizing Delia, a diner cook announces, "You that bitch ran off and left her babies......don't think people don't remember....You the kind we remember." Her return is greeted with even less charity by the congregation of the Cayro Baptist Tabernacle, and Scripture quoting Grandma Windsor who has raised Delia's other two daughters: Amanda, 15, a hellfire and damnation religious zealot, and Dede, 12, a caustic cigarette smoking nymphet. Only M.T., "a big woman, muscular under soft pads of flesh" offers succor to "her lost best friend and the daughter at her side."

Desperate to reclaim her girls, Delia strikes a bargain with the cancer stricken Clint - she will care for him until his death in return for custody of their daughters. Thus, dysfunctional as it may be, they are a family again as Delia works herself into exhaustion, Amanda prays, Dede scorns, and Cissy forms a tenuous rapprochement with the dying man.

While the first half of this deftly crafted narrative focuses on Delia as she battles guilt, recrimination, poverty, and the urge to drink, the second portion belongs to Cissy. It is her coming-of-age tale, rendered with compassion and eloquence. Doubtless there will be parallels drawn between Cissy and Harper Lee's "Scout" in To Kill A Mockingbird. Cissy does not suffer by comparison. Viewing the world with a probative eye she searches hungrily for her identity.

When Cissy is introduced to the mysteries and challenges of spelunking, it is within the black recesses of Little Mouth cave that the young insomniac finds rest and a modicum of peace. "Looking up into the rock ceiling...she imagined she could hear gospel music in the darkness just outside of the light's little circle....she found herself thinking about God, the God who stacked rock on rock and watched after fatherless girls."

Ms. Allison draws her characters forcefully, with telling detail, etching them upon the reader's consciousness. Her description of Clint's final moments is surely one of the most memorable scenes in contemporary literature. Few describe a redneck with the hair trigger accuracy of this author, or more truly limn the evangelistic fervor of southern fundamentalists. Her depiction of enduring friendship, non-judgmental and patient, is tribute to both Ms. Allison's estimable skill as a wordsmith, and the generosity of the human heart.

Rather than the unrelenting cycle of poverty and oppression described in some of Ms. Allison's previous work, this novel ends on a hopeful note. "I wanted to write about people who could change," Ms. Allison has said. "You can create redemption for yourself." Cavedweller is unforgettable affirmation of her belief.

- Gail Cooke