Dorothy Allison - Cavedweller

Table of Contents

Spectacular ... Sensual ... Allison has a spare gospel-tinged lyricism that few can match.

Cissy, the cavedweller of the title, a character of mythic dimensions on the order of Toni Morrisons Sula ... is something to behold.

In Cavedweller, Allison gives us the gritty charms and miseries of the place she comes from. She gives us, too, her understanding of pain and of the strong drive to be herself.

A startling and powerful novel about a womans painful salvation and a young girls coming of age ... and one well worth the time and tears.

New York Post Sensational.Esquire

Funny, heartbreaking ... A brilliant novel.

Cavedweller spans the continent, covers a decade, and traces the lives of four women. It is about grief and sadness and characters crazy with desire to make sense of their lives. A brilliant novel.

Powerful.

One of the glories of Allisons writing is that she refuses to be a good girl ... and that, after all, is what its all about.

DOROTHY ALLISON is the author of Trash; The Women Who Hate Me; Skin: Talking About Sex, Class & Literature; Two or Three Things I Know for Sure; and Bastard Out of Carolina, the acclaimed bestseller and a finalist for the National Book Award. She lives in northern California.

Cavedweller is about healing: deliverance through compromise, love, hope, forgiveness, reconciliation, and redemption. It is a testament to both the strength and frailty of the human spirit. Compassionate, honest, resonant, and poetic.

A womans book through and through, filled with womens suffering, womens strength, womens survival.

Voices weaving in and out, instruments going ... lickety-split, [Cavedweller] is more than a balladits a full-blown hoedown.

Washington Post Book World

Successful in its depiction of the rhythms of everyday life in a small Southern town, Allisons gift for dialogue is evident on every page.

Moving ... has a restless energy and interesting characters that will keep readers caring about the flawed but valiant women who manage to surmount their private griefs through stubborn determination.

A fine writer ... passages of great beauty.

Impassioned prose ... Superbly salted dialogue ... An altogether wonderful second novel.

Allison has an infallible ear for powerful and painful emotion, and she shows that in her tale of four women who must walk through years of hurt to come together and form a family.

Eloquent ... The absolutely dead-on accuracy of the spoken languagethe language of rented houses with peeling paint and hard-baked clay for front yardsand the rich rhythms are there.

A novel about healing ... You know these women are going to reach a better place, and happy to see them get there.

Simply stunning ... As close to flawless as any reader could ask for ... When I finished reading it, I wanted to blow a bugle to alert the public that a wonderful work of fiction by a major new talent has arrived on the scene. Please reserve a seat of honor at the high table of the art of fiction for Dorothy Allison. The special qualities of her style include a perfect ear for speech and its natural rhythms; an unassertive, cumulative lyricism; an intensely imagined and presented sensory world; and above all, a language for the direct articulation of deep and complex feelings.

This book will resonate with you like a gospel choir.

Barbara Kingsolver

Compulsively readable ... Allison can make an ordinary moment transcendent with her sensuous mix of kitchen-sink realism and down-home drawl.

A hell of a writertough and loose, clear and compassionate.

Death changes everything.

It was a little after dawn on the twenty-first of March 1981 when Randall Pritchard torqued his Triumph Bonneville off the 101 interchange southeast of Silverlake. The seventeen-year-old girl behind him gave a terrified howl as she flew off the back of the motorcycle, cartwheeled twice, and slammed facedown on the pavement, breaking both wrists and four front teeth and going mercifully unconscious. Randall never made a sound. He simply followed the bikes trajectory, over the railing toward the sunrise, his long hair shining in the pink-gold glow and his arms outstretched to meet the rusty spokes of the construction barrier at the base of the concrete pilings. A skinny, pockmarked teenager from Inglewood was crouched nearby, rummaging through a stolen backpack. He saw Randall hit the barrier, the dust and rock that rose in a cloud, the blood that soaked Randalls blue cotton shirt.

Delia, the boy told reporters later. The man just whispered Delia and died.

Delia Byrd had been up for an hour, walking back and forth in the tiny garden behind the house in Venice Beach, thinking about the local convenience store, where the liquor was overpriced but accessible twenty-four hours a day. Eyes on the sunrise, fists curled up to her midriff, she was singing to herself, stringing one lyric to another, pulling choruses from songs she had not sung onstage in five years and segueing into garbled versions of rock and roll and folk. She told her friend Rosemary that there was real magic in some of those old melodies, especially the lesser successes of groups like Peter, Paul and Mary and the Kingston Trio. Rosemary laughed at the notion of a mantra in the mundane, but Delia found that after a few dozen repetitions of The MTA she could unfocus her eyes and laugh at the desire to drink.

Oh, he never returned, Delia was singing softly as Randalls head dropped forward and the dark blood gushed one last time. She stopped then. Something may have passed her in the cool morning air, but Delia did not feel it. Focused on the muscles in her neck and upper back, the ones that ached all the time, she wrapped her arms around herself, gripped her shoulders so tightly she started to shake with the effort, and then let go abruptly. The release was luxurious and welcome. A little of the weight lifted, the weight of more than two solid years of trying not to do what she still wanted desperately to do, to sip whiskey until the world turned golden and quiet and safe, until Dede and Amanda Louise, the daughters she had left behind, ceased whispering and whimpering from behind her left ear. She hadnt had a drink since November, and the strain showed.