Southern Discomfort; Fiction Choice

Beginning of article

Byline: JULIE MYERSON

Cavedweller

by Dorothy Allison

Abacus [pounds sterling]9.99

N&D Bookstore price: [pounds sterling]8.99

***

Dorothy Allison, born in 1949 in South Carolina, experienced a childhood of abuse, similar to

that described in her first novel, Bastard Out of Carolina. After college, she worked on a feminist magazine, and in 1989 published a story collection, Trash. Now living in California with her lover, their son and his gay father, she describes herself as `a cross-eyed, working-class lesbian addicted to violence, language and hope'.

Dorothy Allison's hefty, insistent, but overwhelmingly simpatico second novel opens with a death. In the early morning, in the early Eighties, Randall Pritchard, a famous (but, you sense, slightly past-it) rock star, is thrown …