CAVEDWELLER.<i> By Dorothy Allison</i> .<i> Dutton: 436 pp., $24.95</i>

Dorothy Allison put the dirt into dirty realism: real dirt and poverty and violence. In her first novel, “Bastard Out of Carolina,” she re-created the controlled hysteria of a household that frequently erupts with beatings and sexual abuse. Unlike people who have capitalized on the shock value of such stories, Allison succeeded in directing generations of brutality, anger and disgust into a cogent, skillfully formed and developed narrative.

Her biographical essays and stories describe unflinchingly the grim conditions of life in the impoverished hinterland of the American South. In the preface to “Trash,” she explains what compels her: “I put on the page a third experience of a cross-eyed working-class lesbian, addicted to violence, language, and hope, who has made the decision to live, is determined to live, on the page and on the street, for me and mine.” It is Allison’s ability to use strong, direct language to explore the fragile and tangled emotions between love and hate that first brought her work to attention. It is what makes her characters live on the page and beyond.

Allison’s long-awaited second novel, “Cavedweller,” presents the story of Delia Byrd, a hard-boiled recovering alcoholic who landed in Los Angeles after she fled her abusive husband, Clint Windsor, and left behind two small daughters in her hometown of Cayro, Ga. It has been 10 years since Delia took up with charismatic rock musician Randall Pritchard. They began a booze- and drug-filled odyssey, during which she became the well-known singer of Randall’s band, Mud Dog, and gave birth to their daughter, Cissy. Tired of the hedonistic lifestyle, Delia left Randall and vowed to stay sober.

When the novel opens, Randall lies bleeding on the 101 Freeway after crashing his motorcycle. He and Delia have been apart for two years, and Delia, four months on the wagon, is still fighting the urge to drink. A witness to Randall’s accident later recounts that he “just whispered ‘Delia’ and died.”

The circumstances of this story may be dirty, but the first page suggests that Allison has lost her firm grip on what is real. In the remaining pages that follow, she fails to regain it. “Death changes everything” is the first, sentence-long paragraph of the book, a pithy declaration that foreshadows Delia’s sudden urge to drive cross-country and lay claim to her now teenage daughters.

In Cayro, without money or a place to live and confronted by people who see her as the mother who abandoned her babies, Delia goes immediately to her gruff but good-natured grandfather for help. But he refuses to become involved in her affairs, so she turns to her fiercely loyal girlhood friend, M.T.

The maternal sympathy of M.T. is boundless--”Real friends take care of each other,” she tells Cissy--and with her help, Delia’s misfortune turns into a string of unlikely successes. She gets a job, then starts her own beauty salon and wins over the skeptical townspeople. She reaches a bittersweet reconciliation with her ex-husband, who is dying of cancer, and gets custody of their daughters. Amanda, 16 and severely religious, and Dede, 14 and wild, in turn regard their mother with contempt and circumspection.

The narrative loses momentum with the conclusion of Delia’s frantic pursuit of her daughters but still winds on in a desultory chronicle of the women’s lives. Through various traumas (Amanda and Cissy each have life-threatening experiences and Dede has several), Delia exhibits hard-won strength, and the young women come to accept the unalterable condition of being “Delia’s girls.”

About halfway through the book, Cissy becomes interested in caving, and there are long paragraphs about the amorphous beauty and danger of spelunking. Reading “Cavedweller” is like being lost in a network of caves, pausing to explore an interesting pocket, winding through seemingly endless tunnels of thought, emerging sometimes in a place you’ve been before. As for the cave dweller of the title, it is Cissy who likes the isolation of the caves, the dark that will make her “fearless and whole.”

But this book is about Delia, and by the end she has become fearless and whole, though the same cannot be said of the daughters she fought so hard to make her own. “I’ve done something wrong,” she tells Dede. “None of you seem to know who you are or how much I love you.” But, but Delia is much too knowable. She is a one-dimensional symbol, a rock ‘n’ roll Mary Magdalene who, once redeemed, never wanders from her virtuous path. She stays off the booze, gives up cigarettes, takes up jogging, avoids men and devotes all of her energy to working and doling out large spoonfuls of “Mama love.” Unlike the conflicted, genuinely struggling Anne of “Bastard,” Delia is consumed by her need to suffer and exhibits little complexity or real conflict. In the past, Allison has commented poignantly on the sometimes tragic destiny of those tied to desperate families; here she maintains a surprisingly febrile argument for the importance of mothers and for the inextricable bonds between mothers and children.

Yet even this simplistic theme fails to be supported by the narrative. The moment of reunion, the culmination of many years of pining and despairing by Delia, is barely mentioned as the story rushes on to describe Delia’s enormous self-sacrifice in caring for her moribund ex-husband and the awesome devotion of her female friends. Many threads are left hanging: the remarkable plight of the abused wife ministering to the now-fragile abuser is not really explored. The story of how Delia came to be orphaned also suffers from neglect. This horrifying truth should have more impact, but the tension of its impending revelation is not maintained, and the explanation in the last pages seems more like an afterthought than a pervading influence. Other background details are also disappointingly thin.

The story does achieve some depth in the self-righteous Amanda, who is brutally humbled twice: once by her God-fearing grandmother, who denounces Amanda’s sacred visions as the result of “thinking too much,” and once when Amanda finds that the illness she believes will make a holy martyr of her turns out to be only gallstones. The humor and dimension of Amanda’s awakenings provide glimpses of what Allison is capable of. Unfortunately, further development or resolution is eclipsed by yet another crisis involving Dede. Clint also grows in complexity, as he cultivates an intimate relationship with Cissy; Delia, on the other hand, appears essentially unchanged by either his new self-awareness or his death.

“Cavedweller” tries hard to evoke the same gut-wrenching emotion as Allison’s previous works, but it relies on insistent and repetitive prose rather than clarity of voice to achieve it. This is a drawn-out tale in which domestic abuse and personal tragedy become a pale framework for a fervent apotheosis of motherhood and female friendship. Even in that vein, the writing leans precariously toward melodrama and, sadly, falls short of creating something that lives.