Cavedweller

Rating:
Summary: This novel changes protagonists faster than Melrose Place!
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: in-between
Review: I felt so much more anticipation for Delia's growth than what the story offered. Actually, my hope for all the characters were left ungranted. They were interesting, but too defeated for my tastes. I guess that's real life. I did like how they stuck it out, through the mire. On the whole, it was a chore to read the book at times, and it didn't raise me from my lower self. This is my first D. Allison book --should I try bastard out of carolina?

Rating:
Summary: DISARMING CANDOR AND LYRICAL PROSE
Review: 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

Rating:
Summary: I got it from the library and learnt to love its beauty
Review: What I intended to get was Bastard Out of Carolina but well, they don't have it! I thought this book would be extremely boring, the stereotype mother-daughter thing which is similar to works of Kaye Gibbons, Mona Simons, Anne Tyler etc. Nevertheless, the inner beauty and mystery about human relationships stunned me the way the caves attracted Cissy.

This is definitely a beautiful and powerful book. The story might not be anything very exciting but the characters, especially Delia and Cecilia, are vivid and well-remembered. You can easily feel the urge to show sympathy to the women and yet you are surprised to see the strength Delia had to struggle to pull her family together again.

It too is a very realistic book and well, mother-daughter relationships are never easy to maintain. The writer didn't hesitate to mention the flaws in her characters and thus making the novel worth-reading.

Rating:
Summary: Great--but not quite meaty enough
Review: I can't remember if wrote a review of this book earlier in the week..so here goes (sorry if my opinion appears twice!!!)

I keep vascillating between 3 and 4 stars. First off, I think Dorothy Allison is an AMAZING storyteller. The characters in "Cavedweller" really came to life for me. But the problem I had with the book was that I was left wanting more information on each and every person. There were so many different characters that were so emotionally complex, yet I couldn't help but feel slighted at the end of the book because just as I was getting to the bottom of who they really were, the story would shift gears. Also, the characters were very stereotypical. (The Religious One. The Lost Child. The Rebellious Child. The Dying, Scumbag Father.)

Overall, I enjoyed every page because Allison is such a talented writer. If you like "Bastard Out of Carolina" I think you'll really enjoy "Cavedweller".

Rating:
Summary: Might Make a Good Movie
Review: After reading Bastard out of Carolina, Cavedweller was a big disappointment. The book is teeming with characters that leave you yearning for more--more information, more resolution, more anything!

Nonetheless, I think it would be interesting to see it adapted to the big screen (not t.v. though as it would lend itself to the Lifetime Television for Women genre all too easily). On the big screen some of the more extraneous characters could fade into the background and there's a a lot to be done with the cave scenes.

If a film were made, maybe I could finally say that I liked a movie better than the book it was based on!

Rating:
Summary: Everyone thinks he knows zucchini
Review: The cavedweller of the story is the youngest daughter of Delia Byrd, Cissy. It comes to pass that Cissy sleeps bettter in caves than above ground. Having suffered an injury to one of her eyes as a child she is bothered by light anyhow, and does not fear the darkness. She feels safer below ground than in other circumstances.

In the small town in Georgia to which her mother flees, after stopping drinking and the career as a singer she attained on the west coast, there are many people available to make Cissy feel uncomfortable. There is her mother's husband who is dying a difficult death. Actually she comes to feel something like a sort of love for Clint, something no one else feels at the time of his dying. There are her two sisters, Amanda and Dede, reunited with their mother, trying to get through their teen years and challenging the younger girl, and there are the people in the school and the town who ask Cissy about the lives of rock and roll stars. It takes over four hundred pages for Cissy to learn to understand and to love her mother again. It takes that length for her to accept the death of her own father, Randall.

Randall Pritchard died when he flew off the road on his motorcycle. Cissy told her mother, Delia, she had killed him. Delia had abandoned her babies and spent most of the decade drunk. Delia and Cissy left Venice Beach to go to Cayro, Georgia. In Delia's career in music, the music had been made from the core of her. That life had been like a dream. Delia started to run to fight off the desire to drink. She had insomnia. She set up a workshop in which to sand and restore furniture. She listened to talk show radio while she worked and she got mad she told Cissy. Read on. I have read this author's books before now, and this is the best one.

Rating:
Summary: Well written but too sprawling
Review: So many plots, so little development. The main problem I had with "Cavedweller" is that there are so many characters and relationships with stories that are vaguely sketched out for the reader but never fully explored. Some authors can introduce background characters in a way that you can appreciate them on the basis of one scene, but Allison never manages to do that. Maybe because nearly all the characters don't have real world counterparts outside of trailer parks in the deep south.

Rating:
Summary: Why did it take me so long to read this book??
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: What if real life doesn't have a narrative
Review: Tony Earley wrote that he judges his work on its ability to write about the South in a way that reveals its history, its "Christ-haughtedness," and its flavor. He says that he tries to accomplish this while not making the kind of characters that slip into stereotypes -- gun toting, gap-toothed smiling, et al. This is the kind of debate that anyone who reads Southern literature ought to think about. There is a lot of work out there that borders on getting most of its mileage on the creation of Southern characters that stand as symbols.
Dorothy Allison's Cavedweller is decidely not this kind of book. It has plenty of real people with too many quirks to fit within the straightjacket of the Dukes of Hazzard.
The story has the same character structure as "The Poisonwood Bible" -- a mother who tends to a flock of three daughters while an absent father figure strays in the background. In this case, the daughters suffer from too much religion, too much partying, and too much spelunking, respectively. I enjoyed how the book dips into each of their lives for stretches at a time.
This means that all of the figures wax and wane in their significance to the overall narrative of the story. Some times we read about the the mother, other times about each of the daughters. This book probably gains on the Poisonwood Bible in the way that it also has real men, even if they are more minor. Nolan wants to marry the middle daughter, loves to play music, but cannot have both. Delia's first husband has a lot of wisdom about love, even if he learned about its value when he lost it. If this sounds like a lot of disparate paths, that's because this is the kind of book that Dorothy Allison has written. Its a book where lots of struggles cross within one small Georgia town. Most of the struggles could take place in Atlanta or Omaha. Its not just a Southern book, even if it still is coated in Georgia clay dust.
I would recommend this book for book clubs, because it has so many entry points for reflection.