Prodigal Mom

By R.Z. Sheppard

Dorothy Allison, author of Bastard out of Carolina and other fiction that could be pirated for an album's worth of country-and-western, knows a thing or two about lonely nights and cheating hearts. She also has a grip on the elementary physics of gender: women are centripetal, the force that binds. Men are centrifugal; for all their good intentions, they feel best when whirling away from the center.

Allison's deeply etched females are pulled both ways. Like Delia Byrd in Allison's Cavedweller (E.P. Dutton; 435 pages; $24.95), they can achieve escape velocity and attempt dangerous re-entries.

Delia is a pop singer who leaves a mean husband and two baby daughters in Cayro, Ga., to run off to Los Angeles with rock star Randall Pritchard and his pretty-good band, Mud Dog. Ten years later, her homing instinct kicks in after Randall is killed in the spectacular motorcycle wreck that hooks the reader on the first page of the novel.

Exhausted by fleeting fame, too much alcohol and yearning for the girls she left behind, Delia heads east to rescandalize Cayro. With her is Cissy, her daughter by Randall, and the precocious young spelunker of the book's title.

Allegorists as well as just plain readers should feel at home in Cavedweller, a mix of down-home authenticity, old-time religion and neo-paganism. Delia, the prodigal mother, returns to the fold, but only after parading her suffering before the righteous. Born in California's stupefying sunshine, Cissy finds inspiration exploring Georgia's inky caverns: a "confrontation with God in the imagined body of a woman, the mama-core."

At times Allison's lyricism derails ("her hips rocked loosely on the pistons of her thighs"), and her supporting cast of friends and kin hangs on too long. But the central story of mother and daughter runs true, both on and beneath the surface.

--By R.Z. Sheppard