I recently spent forty-eight hours visiting my childhood home, where, in 2013, I deposited an unconscionable number of books before moving to California. Ten years on, the bookshelves are something like a mood board of my early twenties: short-story collections with the same flat affect; rangy, unread best-sellers; New Directions Pearls. I was thrilled to be reunited with Dorothy Baker’s “Cassandra at the Wedding,” a strange, funny, delicious novel, published in 1962 and reissued, twice, by NYRB Classics. The novel is narrated, for the most part, by Cassandra Edwards, a charismatic, self-destructive, drifting graduate student prone to tepid affairs and suicidal ideation. When the novel opens, she is tearing through California’s Central Valley in a sports car, en route from Berkeley to her childhood home, where her identical-twin sister, Judith, is due to be wed. Like all good weddings, this one doubles as a reunion: Cassandra and Judith, long accustomed to insular codependence, have spent the previous nine months apart, a tense separation. For Judith, distance has provided an opportunity for individuation; for Cassandra, whose selfhood is deeply reliant on her sister, it has precipitated, or exacerbated, an existential crisis. When I first read “Cassandra at the Wedding,” I took pleasure in the tightly wound dialogue and neat, zero-waste structure of the novel; being the same age as Cassandra and Judith, I was also the natural audience for the story of a chaotic, lost, self-sabotaging protagonist—an aspiring writer, naturally—who was still, somehow, winning. More recently, I was moved by the women’s delicate relationships with their father and grandmother, and by the oblique but unsubtle depiction of the compromises involved in striking out on one’s own. This is an ideal beach read—all the better if you live someplace where the beaches are cold.
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