Second chances

Dorothy Allison takes a more hopeful look at the mother-daughter bond

by Liza Featherstone

CAVEDWELLER, by Dorothy Allison. Dutton, 435 pages, $24.95.

"I think love's like this zucchini," observes a character in Dorothy Allison's second novel, Cavedweller, as he picks at his bar food. "Everybody thinks they know zucchini. . . . They don't really know it. . . . Half the people who eat this can't tell you what they ate. Always think it is something else." The next day, his girlfriend shoots him.

Romantic love, in Dorothy Allison's fiction, is a bewildering and tragic force. It drives men to beat women senseless and spend decades being sorry, or to forgive them far too easily. Women in love shoot their men, abandon and endanger their children, wash the dying bodies of those who have beaten them. But crazy as this all this may seem, it's not nearly as tragic as mother love, which is, for Allison, the heart's ultimate setup. In Bastard Out of Carolina, Dorothy Allison's achingly lyrical first novel, a fiercely loving mother, forced to choose between her child and her husband, fails the child almost unforgivably. The novel ends as the daughter gives up on her mother for good -- and finally begins to understand her.

Cavedweller, in a sense, retells Bastard's story with different characters and a different outcome. This time the mother is allowed an entire novel in which to redeem herself; the children, a lifetime to understand her. Where Bastard opens with a mother's love, Cavedweller begins with her failings: drunkenness, forgetfulness, and worse. Delia is a rock singer in Los Angeles who, years ago, abandoned two young daughters in Cayro, Georgia. Her third daughter, Cissy, is 10 years old. When Cissy's father -- no longer Delia's lover -- is killed in a motorcycle accident, Delia does what she's long wanted to do. She and a hostile, grieving Cissy get in the car and drive to Georgia to find Amanda and Dede, Delia's lost daughters, the half-sisters Cissy has never met. In Cayro, Cissy learns that Delia is a pariah -- shunned as a woman who left her children to pursue a life of sin, fame, money, and pleasure. But we soon find out that the reasons for Delia's flight weren't so simple, and as we learn more of Delia's history, her choices begin to make more sense.

Unfortunately, Cavedweller isn't nearly as good as Bastard Out of Carolina. The plot loses focus once Delia gets Amanda and Dede back, which happens pretty early on. The prose is disappointing throughout; dialogue is weighed down with folksy truisms like "Some days I think life should come with one big warning label." Relationships between key characters are often left undeveloped, partly because the point of view keeps shifting (it's mostly Cissy's story in the beginning, but just about every major character gets to play protagonist at some point) -- which adds to the impression of narrative chaos.

Cavedweller feels more like a soap opera than a novel, not so much because of all the melodrama -- though people are constantly shooting each other for love, taking deathly ill, or reuniting with lost family members -- but because it lacks a single binding story, a central situation that must be seen through to the end. Bastard Out of Carolina, after all, didn't make such a hit on the book-club circuit just because its prose was breathtaking, though it was. It was also a damn good yarn, the kind that's as consuming as your own life. Cavedweller has characters we care about, but it doesn't demand our constant close attention.

Still, even if it's disappointing on its own, Cavedweller is compelling as a continuation of Bastard's meditation on motherhood. Delia, unlike the mother in Bastard, doesn't find it difficult to choose her children over a man. She left Cissy's father when, driving while high on drugs, he nearly killed the little girl. Back in Cayro, Delia stops sleeping with the sheriff when he starts arresting Dede for marijuana possession and traffic violations. For Delia, the hardest choice is between her children and herself. When she left her first two daughters, it was to save her own life, and it was then that she discovered her musical passion; after she returns to them, we're not sure she'll ever get it back. Like the lesbian aunt in Bastard, the childless women in Cavedweller -- Delia's friends Rosemary and M.T. -- seem happiest; children bring guilt and gallstones. Still, the inevitability of motherhood for most women seems, by the novel's end, less tragic. Pregnant, one young woman decides to have the baby, telling her man, "Oh hell . . . we can't do no worse than everybody else, right?"

"I've just barely managed to make up for some of what I've done. And even that's not certain," says Delia. Not certain, but at least possible. Motherhood itself, like Delia, approaches redemption in this novel. It's hard, complicated, but not quite as doomed as it is in Bastard; while it's impossible not to make decisions that will hurt children, Allison seems to say, mothers' failures can be tempered, mitigated, forgiven. Maybe.