Cavedweller

ArtForum, March, 1998 by Katherine Dieckmann

Near the end of the new book, Allison's central character, a reformed alcoholic rock-'n'-roller named Delia Byrd, tells her middle daughter, Dede, "how most families get started," an issue that is very much Cavedweller's preoccupation. It takes "a needy woman and a smiling man," notes Delia, "or the other way around. A little charm and a lot of hunger, that's how most of us began." The "smiling man" is ultimately somewhat beside the point here, however, as he was in Bastard (where the man was a violent child abuser). Allison's real obsession, the bedrock of her tales of clans twisted then reunited through shared craziness and forgiveness, is what she calls "the cool balm of mama love."

Allison's characters are forever searching for the softly murmured word, the comforting embrace, the refusal to judge. Mama. In Bastard, that quest made for a set of tricky emotional pacts: a daughter's thirst, a mother's failure to provide, sheer human weakness that in the end must be accepted for anyone to move on. (A crucial flaw in Angelica Huston's film version of Bastard was its inability to show why a woman would caress the head of the man who raped her daughter, a scenario that Allison's novel made perfectly legible.) The same themes of botched maternity and wounded daughterdom play throughout Cavedweller, but to far less resonant effect. Whether it's because Allison has trod similar terrain too often before (her slim book, Two or Three Things I Know for Sure, followed Bastard with an autobiographical illumination of much of that novel's material), or because even the most gifted writer can't get beyond the cliches of the self-destructive female rocker (let alone the redeeming hen party that is the southern beauty parlor), Cavedweller reads like a hipper Steal Magnolias crossed with a less punitive Stella Dallas.

Cavedweller kicks off in Los Angeles in 1981, where Delia, former '70s rock-'n'-roll hellion, discovers that Randall, her ex-husband, former bandmate, and father of her ten-year-old daughter, Cissy, has died in a motorcycle wreck. Delia takes this cataclysm as a sign to head back to her Cayro, Georgia home and face up to the fact that she abandoned her two older daughters, now teenagers, when they were tiny, skipping town on a tour bus to escape her marriage to the girls' cruel prick of a daddy. Delia's guilt over leaving her babies led to years of alcoholism; once a sweet drunk, she's now mean and sober. Delia has severely strained her relationship with Cissy, who is in a sense as neglected as the big sisters she's never known.

Allison moves through this setup with uncharacteristic awkwardness. Delia recalls her love for Randall thus: "He had been so beautiful when he took her in his arms, so strong and tender when she was so hurt. He had felt like the one man on earth she could hang on to and be safe. How could she not have loved him? She loved him more than her life." But the romance novel tropes pale next to the clunkiness of Allison's pop references. Randall and Delia's band was called Mud Dog, their best-selling album Diamonds and Dirt. Rock-'n'-roll "realness" is supposed to be established through sentences like, "Delia had never met John Lennon, but she had once watched Yoko sit patiently through the kind of numbing interview she had never been able to stand." As a consequence, the Delia of Cavedweller's early sections seems like a forced fabrication.

Once Delia and Cissy cross the Mason-Dixon line, however, Allison is on surer ground. Delia faces recalcitrant relatives and small-town scorn as she slowly reclaims her long-lost daughters, Amanda and Dede, who have grown, respectively, into a prim religious zealot and a wild-ass troublemaker. Delia takes over the local beauty parlor, The Bonnet (like all such institutions, a site for "dreams and lust and the approximation of a fantasy"), and rebonds with her woman pals, most memorably the zaftig and lusty M.T. To get her older girls back, Delia cares for her detested ex, Clint, as he dies of cancer. Meanwhile, young Cissy comes of age, forging her own identity by exploring local caves with a pair of older girls, Jean and Mim, who turn out to be lovers (the suggestion is that Cissy's desire will turn to women, too).

The soap operatics implicit here often overwhelm Allison's evident wish to carve out a strong, womancentric story, and she pursues many a digressive subplot while losing her major players for long stretches. There's the snappy black best friend from LA who comes to rescue Delia after her depressive "crying season"; the clarinet-playing, sci-fi-fixated buddy of Cissy's who falls for Dede (and whom Dede shoots in a jealous rage); crotchety grandaddy Byrd; even meaner Grandma Windsor. Allison also wreaks far too much totemic damage for even a 448-page novel to bear, including the flaw in Cissy's eye from a car wreck Randall and Dede had when she was a kid, and the mysterious disappearance of Delia's own family when she was young, the recounting of which propels a crucial mother-daughter bonding session between Delia and Cissy.