REDEMPTION, GA.

IN DOROTHY ALLISON'S NOVEL OF MAKING A NEW LIFE, YOU CAN GO HOME AGAIN

Author: By Gail Caldwell, Globe Staff

Date: SUNDAY, March 15, 1998

Page: F1

Section: Books

Almost nonchalantly epic, with the yarn-spinning rhythm of old Southern legends, ``Cavedweller'' is Dorothy Allison's rock 'n' roll novel: full of sweet-dream fever and lots of lyrics and a couple of pistol shots. Its narrative has a slow momentum that takes over without your realizing it; even when the novel stumbles or wanders off the main path, its story -- the heartfelt urgency of what happens to whom -- carries you along. After the searing, awful truths of ``Bastard out of Carolina,'' the 1992 novel that made Allison's name, ``Cavedweller'' is so full of honeysuckle possibility it sometimes seems like ``The Waltons'' by comparison. But all the happy endings here are hard-earned, and they make no more promises than a sunrise does about the day ahead. The one thing Dorothy Allison knows, as one of Delia's daughters tells another, is that ``terrible things happen all the time.''

``Cavedweller'' is about how you ride through those times, how you get from one end of the country to the other to reclaim a family and rebuild a life. It's about cruelty and mercy and one more day of undistinguished burdens, and about the moments of color in between that you stockpile to feed your soul. Most of all, in its slow-moving incantations and deep portraits of Cayro's people, it's about honoring the ordinary -- about finding within the close-focus familiar that high-priced mystery called love.

Delia used to be an expert at the artificial kind, the love that drew her to Clint, her abusive husband, and then Randall, who gave her a place in his band and a third daughter, Cissy, and nearly killed them in a car accident. She knows about the love of the bottle, too: When ``Cavedweller'' opens, Delia is a few months on the other side of a drink, and Randall has just been killed in a motorcycle smashup. Still shaking from the effects of both, Delia loads her few belongings and 10-year-old Cissy in a beat-up Datsun and heads east on I-10. She is in Cayro three days later, half-crazy but hellbent on getting back her older daughters.

What she finds in Georgia is even harder than she dreamed: a dying Clint; teenage daughters, Amanda and Dede, who seem to fear and loathe her; a stone-faced mother-in-law who quotes the Old Testament and refuses to let Delia near the girls. Most of the townfolk of Cayro are no more forgiving; to them, Delia is the blackguard Byrd girl who abandoned her own children for drugs and scandal. Undeterred by this version of Christian wrath, Delia does penance every way she can find: in regular attendance at the Baptist church, in caring for Clint in his final days, in working with a cleaning crew and at the A & P. No ex-rock star ever put in more muscle at crummier jobs. Eventually, she regains custody of her daughters, begrudging though they are toward this mother-stranger, and acquires the lease on the town beauty shop, the Bee's Bonnet, where she worked as a girl. And Delia is no slouch at styling hair: ``This was work she could do with both eyes closed and half her mind engaged elsewhere. When she put her hands on a woman's head, Delia Byrd felt almost as powerful as she had when she stood onstage with Mud Dog.''

Now, really. Mud Dog's questionable genius notwithstanding, no Grace Slick Jr. ever got such satisfaction at a sink and a hair dryer. As much as I found myself admiring Allison's impulse to glorify (or at least respect) the workaday life of rural America, much of that romanticism strains the imagination. We are asked to believe that the laundry room offers not just solace but inspiration to alienated young Cissy; that Dede, armed with a felonious attitude and a pack of smokes, has found her great challenge (and triumph) in managing a convenience store. And that Nolan, a sweet boy who adores Dede and who turns out to be a prodigy on the clarinet, will gladly give up every chance of musical glory to stay in Cayro, run the biscuit factory, and follow his heart. These are comforting possibilities but not very likely ones. In trying her best to give due credit to the fullness of small-town life -- what Dede calls ``God's own boring workday'' -- Allison winds up sentimentalizing it.

There are other moments of incredulity: No preteen, no matter how precocious, is hanging out reading Tim O'Brien's ``Going After Cacciato,'' or using ``Paradise Lost'' a few years later to explain the world around her. And Allison's naming a Mud Dog CD ``Diamonds and Dust'' simply makes the reader cringe. Such indulgences feel self-referential rather than revealing. But what Allison depicts with ease is a far-flung, luxurious map of the complex territory among three daughters and their mother: Delia, with her rock-solid tenacity at doing it right this time around, has found equally worthy adversaries in all her girls. Amanda, the oldest, has absorbed the brimstone and punitive silence of Grandma Windsor, while Dede rebels in the other direction, toward her own heavenly oblivion of drugs and sex. Cissy, who in some ways had the most to lose by the Byrd females' reunion, is in command of the novel's central metaphor: She escapes into the perfect darkness of the underground caves of north Georgia, finding in that ``bludgeoned heart of the earth'' a journey of risk and redemption, as close to God as she'll probably ever get.

Cissy's continual pilgrimage to the caves possesses its own beauty and danger, but it also mirrors the emotional components of Allison's story: Delia's stubborn endurance, her daughters' efforts to make their own way, the novel's themes of displacement and home and of searching for God in the darkest of places. The sheer force of ``Cavedweller'' -- the powerful lure of story itself -- propels it past its own occasional ramblings and rough transitions and failures of credibility; if you can believe a burned-out rock star manque can go home to Cayro and find light and certainly peace, then the novel flows with the easy grace of the storytellers of the Southern tradition.

``We don't never talk, do we?'' Dede asks her mother near the end of ``Cavedweller.'' Delia shakes her head: ``We an't the type.'' But we've been listening to them through a decade of suffering and hope, and through more than 400 pages. That should tell you something about the humility of these women, and about Allison's loving evocation of who they really are.

On the tenth Sunday, Mrs. Pearlman put one hand on Delia's shoulder as she pushed herself painfully up the aisle. It was an accolade. No matter arthritis, hip replacement surgery, or pain past comprehending, Marcia Pearlman would never have touched the sinner without proof of repentance. It was a promise of forgiveness, if not actual forgiveness as yet. In the way of things, women screwed up just as men did, but women's sins were paid for by children and women friends. The debt had a ready and simple dimension. The woman who had run off and fallen into the good life could never be forgiven, but the woman who came back ruined and wounded, painfully sober and stubbornly enduring, the woman who suffered publicly and hard -- that woman had a chance. That woman could be brought back into the circle.

DOROTHY ALLISON, from ``Cavedweller''