Cassandra at the Wedding

By Dorothy Baker
Afterword by Deborah Eisenberg

Cassandra Edwards is a graduate student at Berkeley: gay, brilliant, nerve-wracked, miserable. At the beginning of this novel, she drives back to her family ranch in the foothills of the Sierras to attend the wedding of her identical twin, Judith, to a nice young doctor from Connecticut. Cassandra, however, is hell-bent on sabotaging the wedding.

Dorothy Baker's entrancing tragicomic novella follows an unpredictable course of events in which her heroine appears variously as conniving, self-aware, pitiful, frenzied, absurd, and heartbroken—at once utterly impossible and tremendously sympathetic. Cassandra reckons with her complicated feelings about the sister who she feels owes it to her to be her alter ego; with her father, a brandy-soaked retired professor of philosophy; and with the ghost of her dead mother, as she struggles to come to terms with the only life she has.

First published in 1962, Cassandra at the Wedding is a book of enduring freshness, insight, and verve. Like the fiction of Jeffrey Eugenides and Jhumpa Lahiri, it is the work of a master stylist with a profound understanding of the complexities of the heart and mind.

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Reviews

It’s hard not to be caught up from the very first page by the first-person voice of the speaker...Originally published in 1962, this is the compulsively readable story of Cassandra’s unwilling trip home to attend (or prevent) her twin sister’s Judith wedding. She’s one of those neurotic, intelligent women, trying to understand the direction her life has taken.
— Nancy Pearl, Book Lust

Tightly-written and compelling, [the novel] flows and sparkles like a spring freshet.
— William Hogan, San Francisco Chronicle

Cassandra at the Wedding is an extraordinary novel, and of a kind that hardly exists in the English let alone the American tradition. As a sustained piece of stylistic wit I can think of no other American novel that is its equal; as a taut and muted drama of the heart-break often inherent in the very closest human relationships, I can think of very few.
— Mark Schorer

[Baker's] ear for dialogue is acute, her prose immaculate...this is a novel of exceptional quality.
— Times Literary Supplement

The classical simplicity Baker admired in the writing of others is a hallmark of her own...Her prose has a 1990s immediacy that makes it hard to remember that the book was published in 1962.
— Peter Parker and Frank Kermode, A Reader's Guide to the 20th Century American Novel

An important achievement...intoxicating fun.
— Lillian Smith

Mrs. Baker's art, as superior and self-exacting as ever, renders human nature with great clarity and little compromise.
— New York Herald Tribune

A study of love and isolation and identity... concentratedly and skillfully dramatic.
— The New York Times

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. I can only think back to Young Man with a Horn, and be overwhelmed by Dorothy Baker's continuing brilliance.
— Carson McCullers

Also see:

English, August By Upamanyu Chatterjee Introduction by Akhil Sharma A satirical look at Indian society by an internationally acclaimed writer.

Alone! Alone! By Rosemary Dinnage In the course of over thirty years of writing about psychology, child development, biography, and fiction, Rosemary Dinnage has encountered a variety of outstanding women, all of whom, in one way or another, felt powerfully alone.

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