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Books and Cooks September 1999

Cavedweller

Our rating: 3.73 cups of tea!
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 Cavedweller by Dorothy Allison

Discussion date: Thursday, September 23, 1999. Time: 7:00PM

Discussion place: Stephanie's place.

Menu: Chocolate and red wine.

Salon magazine published an interview with Dorothy Allison shortly after Cavedweller was published.

The New York Times Book Review says:
This is not a novel interested in formal invention, in ironic distance or even in elegant prose. It doesn't give two cents for post-modern preening or cold intellectual approaches. It is clear-eyed about the economic forces that shape these women's lives, but it is also unabashedly emotional and hopeful about their futures. It reaches back to the conventions of straightforward storytelling and pays close attention to the way women get by, the way they come to forgive one another, the way they choose who they will be.

There is a generic Amazon interview with Allison available. The review at Amazon says:
"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.

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.

The Books and Cooks Cavedweller Informal Reading Guide
(member-generated questions in no particular order -- coming after the meeting)

  • Why does Amanda start drinking?

  • Is Delia a good mother? Are her maternal urges genuine, or something that she feels obligated to have?

  • Do you think the characters where well-developed? Did you have a good sense of them?

  • Why is it called Cavedweller?

  • Are the three daughters victims?

  • A reviewier at Amazon commented that the characters are very stereotypical: "The Religious One. The Lost Child. The Rebillious Child. The Dying, Scumbag Father." Is this an accurate perception of the book? If so, are any of the characters non-stereotypical?

  • Was Delia's sudden recovery from crying season realistic?

  • What did the caves, and Cissy's relationship to the caves, mean?

  • Is the relationship between Delia and Amanda and Dede realistic?

  • What role(s) do Jean and Mim play? Are they necessary to the story?

  • Does Clint end up being a sympathetic character? Is he meant to?

  • What do you think of Allison's use of language to evoke feeling and setting?

  • To what extent is Cissy's journey through the cave a metaphor for the novel as a whole?

  • Why/When does Cissy stop reading?

  • Why were men's deaths so much more abundant than women's?

  • What role in the story did the fact that Cissy's friends were lesbians play? Was it ultimately important?

  • Is Cissy as different from her other family members as she believes herself to be?

  • Did Clint's death or Clint's dying change the family more?

  • Is the method of Delia's reintegration back into Cayro's society believable? At what point, if ever, does it become complete?

  • Did Cavedweller remind you of Beloved or any other book that youv'e read? If so, which books and in what way?

  • Why does hard work heal Delia but cripple Grandma Windsor?

  • Did Delia's uncle Luke kill the rest of her family?

  • Did the caving expedition work in the novel, or was it contrived?

This Page Last Revised: November 21, 2000.