Cassandra at the Wedding

by Dorothy Baker

Book Overview

Cassandra Edwards is a graduate student at Berkeley- gay, brilliant, nerve-racked, miserable. At the beginning of this novel, she drives back to her family ranch in the foothills of the Sierras to... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1590171128
• ISBN13: 9781590171127
• Release Date: September 2004
• Publisher: New York Review of Books
• Length: 241 Pages
• Weight: 0.63 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.2" x 8.1"

Customer Reviews

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Baker's crafting of an "unreliable narrator" is worthy of greater notice

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.