SOURCE: “Joplin Sings Georgia,” in Nation, Vol. 266, No. 11, March 30, 1998, pp. 25–27.

In the following positive review of Cavedweller, Wypijewski praises Allison's ability to create fully fleshed, multifaceted characters that have both unlikable and redeeming qualities.

Up a dirt road in a graveyard in Guilford, Vermont, a marker worn from the rains of 200 years commemorates a life just this way: “A tired woman in a weary land.” Alongside are the headstones of the four children she buried—the opening and closing lines of her untold story, one that will never be old enough. There's no antiquity to the silence that wraps around grief. It is boundless and constant and the reason a review of Dorothy Allison might begin as easily with an evocation of eighteenth-century rural Vermont as with the South of the fifties, or the sexual liberation struggles of the sixties, seventies and eighties, or the neediness of a...