Cassandra at the Wedding (Virago Modern Classics) [Paperback]

Dorothy Baker (Author)

Book Description

Series: Virago Modern Classics | Publication Date: January 10, 1998

"I'm not, at heart, a jumper; it's not my sort of thing...I think I knew all the time I was sizing up the bridge that the strong possibility was I'd go home, attend my sister's wedding as invited, help hook-and-zip her into whatever she wore, take the bouquet while she received the ring, through the nose or on the finger, wherever she chose to receive it, and hold my peace when it became a question of speaking now of forever holding it." It is the hottest June on record and the longest day of the year. Cassandra Edwards -tormented, intelligent, mordantly witty - leaves her graduate studies and her Berkeley flat to drive through the scorching heat to her family's ranch. There they are all assembled: her philosopher father, smelling sweetly of five-star Hennessy; her kind, fussy grandmother; her beloved, identical twin sister Judith, who is about to be married - unless Cassandra can help it.

Editorial Reviews

Review

'I-whose usual bed time is ten o'clock-stayed up all night reading that exquisite Cassandra at the Wedding-dazzled by the pyrotechnics of such an artist' Carson McCullers 'A novel of exceptional quality' The Times 'Flows and sparkles like a spring freshet' San Francisco Chronicle 'Belongs with Salinger's Catcher in the Rye and McCullers's The Member of the Wedding as a modern American classic' Georgina Hammick

About the Author

Dorothy Dodds Baker (1907-68) was born in Montana but grew up in California and after her marriage lived in France. Her first novel, Young Man with a Horn, about a white jazz musician, was a great critical success and was made into a film starring Kirk Do

Product Details

• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: Virago (January 10, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0860682447
• ISBN-13: 978-0860682448
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,295,322 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

31 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Baker's crafting of an "unreliable narrator" is worthy of greater notice, November 18, 2005

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T. M. Teale (Colorado Springs, CO, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Cassandra at the Wedding (Paperback)

The novel, Cassandra at the Wedding (first published in 1962), starts out simply enough; the first-person narrator, Cassandra Edwards, tells us that the spring semester has ended at Berkeley, California, where she is writing an M.A. thesis on the contemporary French novel; and she's packing a bag to drive to her parents' ranch near Tipton to attend her sister Judith's marriage to a truly lovable man. Not only is Cassandra a budding scholar, she's a talented pianist, and competitive swimmer, and she loves her sister more than anyone--even more than her sister's fiancee--so Cassie thinks. For this is the point: Cassie cannot bear to part with her nearly identical twin sister and will do almost anything to stop their wedding. As Cassie lets us deeper into her thought processes, the reader will find that--as learned and cultured as she is--Cassie isn't aware of the effects she has on others and on herself: Cassie is often cynical, passive aggressive, and wantonly perverse in her refusal to "get it," i.e., to love and let love. Her insolence towards the people she says she loves is an astonishing dismissal of their emotional lives. The fact that Dorothy Dodds Baker makes it easy for us to see Cassie without Cassie seeing herself is testament to the author's mastery of irony and understatement. Without a doubt Baker has created a character who is both infuriating and heroic. In fact, it's Cassie's youth and intelligence that makes her inability to let her sister go such a riveting contemporary drama. Also of note: The NYRB book cover is an appropriate painting by David Park; Deborah Eisenberg's "Afterward" is informative.

22 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a stunning rebuke to shallow-as-glass chick lit, June 15, 2008

By 

Jesse Kornbluth "Head Butler" (New York) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Cassandra at the Wedding (Virago Modern Classics) (Paperback)

You're a twin --- so close to your sister that she moved across the country.

Now she's getting married to a man you've never met and cutting the cord for good.

And you're her only bridesmaid.

In the universe we now inhabit --- the urban chickscape of "Sex and the City" --- Cassandra Edwards would have a posse of smart-talking, Chardonnay-swilling pals to help her through this overwrought moment. They'd gab for hours about her choice of a bridesmaid's dress. They'd speculate about the groom's endowment. And they'd tease Cassandra for her ambivalence about catching the bouquet.

"Cassandra at the Wedding" is a stunning rebuke to that shallow-as-glass sensibility.

More to the point, it's a smart, stylish, disturbing novel --- a book much too good to languish at an Amazon.com ranking of 1,000,000.

But then, Dorothy Baker is not exactly a household name. Young Man with a Horn --- her fictionalized account of the doomed jazz great Bix Beiderbecke --- was published in 1938. It's pure pleasure; I've read it a dozen times since discovering it as a kid. I thought it was her only novel until a Butler reader tipped me to "Cassandra at the Wedding", the last of what turn out to be Baker's three novels.

Like "Young Man with a Horn," this novel begins effortlessly: "I told them I could be free by the twenty-first, and that I'd come home the twenty-second." That makes Cassandra seem chatty and friendly. Well, it doesn't take long for her bitchy side to surface. Example: Her twin's beloved is John Thomas Finch. Cassandra's comment: "Where'd she meet him --- Birdland?"

Soon we see that Cassandra is an inventory of neurosis. She's writing a thesis about French writers rather than be a writer --- her mother wrote plays and novels --- but she's stumbling even in her academic writing. Her biggest issue, naturally, is her twin. She's just obsessed. And with every detail of their lives. She was, she notes, born "two ounces heavier and eleven minutes older than the one named Judith."

As children, they lived on the Northern California ranch where Judith will be married. They came right home after school: "We didn't need people." Now, even though separated, they're so in tune with one another that they have both bought the same dress to wear at the wedding.

To Cassandra, that's one more metaphor for all that's wrong about Judith's wedding --- one more reason she must stop it. She explains this to us at great length, and some readers, wading through these pages, will think this book is just talk talk talk. It's not. Baker is doing something far more subtle and accomplished --- she's presenting a close account of an unraveling personality.

On the wedding day, there's an event. No spoilers here, but it's not the wedding, and it is a shocker. And it leads to more. And, in the end, you feel you've come to know some people at least as complex as you are and as twisted as some people you know.

Oh, there's a twitch I've failed to mention. "With men I feel like a bird in the clutch of a cat, terrified, caught in a nightmare of confinement, wanting nothing but to get free and take a shower," Cassandra tells us. Translation: She's gay. Context: "Cassandra" was published in 1962, so at no point is this ever made explicit. But you can read the entire book without being aware of her sexuality. For me, that's the mark of good writing.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Astonishing Novel, April 16, 2011

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A Common Reader (Irvine, Calif.) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Cassandra at the Wedding (Paperback)

I don't understand how this book could have sunk into obscurity: it's a powerful and beautiful novel, intense and absorbing, deeply layered--the kind that you want to re-read the moment you reach the last page, and one that you know you will return to regularly throughout your life. You'll have gained an idea of what the novel is about from synopses and other reviews, so I won't go into that except to say that, for me, it's most deeply about growing up, how there's really no end to the struggle to come into one's own true self--no end to the pain of it, nor the exhilaration of it.