Books |
Cassandra at the Wedding
Dorothy Baker
By
Published: Jul 28, 2020
Category:
Fiction
COSTCO’S BOOK OF THE MONTH: Pennie Clark Ianniciello, Costco’s book buyer, has chosen “The Wedding Thief” by Mary Simses, as her pick of the month for July. In Costco Connection, which goes to many of the warehouse club’s members, she wrote:
“I’m an only child, so stories about siblings have always intrigued me. It’s the relationship between sisters Sara and Mariel that drew me to this month’s book buyer’s pick, The Wedding Thief by Mary Simses.
“Sara is a Type-A event planner, while Mariel is more free-spirited, and the two have never gotten along. Sara is lured back home, only to find out she’s been summoned to help plan Mariel’s wedding–to a man she stole from Sara. Sara hatches a plan to ruin the nuptials, but will she change her mind and save the day?”
To read an excerpt — brace yourself: genius at work — click here. To buy it? You’re on your own. Or maybe, just maybe, you’d like to read a great novel about two sisters and a wedding…
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 inhabited until recently 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.
It’s a smart, stylish, disturbing novel — a book much too good to languish at an Amazon.com ranking of 1,000,000. Carson McCullers: “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.” [To buy the paperback from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]
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 — and 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 damn good writing.
