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A review by emtees
Cassandra at the Wedding by Dorothy Baker
challenging
dark
emotional
funny
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
This book is one I can appreciate more than say I enjoyed. The prose is beautiful, the characterization is really strong - it is a psychological novel more than anything else - and the ideas at work are interesting. But it isn’t much fun to read, and unlike other novels where you might say the same thing, it also isn’t tragic, heartbreaking or enlightening. Actually, it left me pretty conflicted on a couple of points.
Cassandra is a graduate student in the 1960’s, traveling home to attend the wedding of her identical twin sister, Judith. From the start it is clear that Cassandra isn’t happy about the wedding - even more so than most identical twins, Cassandra sees Judith as her other half, her soulmate, and she isn’t just jealous or sad about losing her sister: she believes she and Judith made an agreement to live their whole lives together, as partners, and that Judith has violated that agreement. But Cassandra is sure that if she can just speak to her sister before the wedding, she can fix this. All this may sound a little intense, but when we meet the Edwards family, it becomes clear why they are like this. The twins grew up on a remote farm with their brilliant, artistic parents, who raised them to love the music and literature their peers knew nothing about. Cut off by their upbringing from their peers, Cassandra and Judith were bound tightly together, and while Judith may have made a step beyond the family circle by becoming engaged, it is clear that she, too, feels the intense connection. But she is still determined to break free and go her own way, and in the face of that, Cassandra must take drastic action.
The strength of this book is in the characterization and the use of the narrative voice. Cassandra narrates the majority of the story, and she is a fascinating character. Intelligent, dramatic, mercurial, but also plagued with self-doubt and impulsiveness, Cassandra is a master at presenting her story as she sees it. Through Cassandra’s eyes, we are introduced to the Edwards family in all their brilliance; to the loving and devoted relationship between the sisters; to the sense that Cassandra and Judith are meant to be different and special. I would not go so far as to call Cassandra an unreliable narrator - she is not deliberately withholding anything from the audience; indeed, I’m not sure she’d even be capable of that - but her perspective is distinct. And at a key moment, when the narrative shifts from her to Judith, we are made to question how she has presented her family, her relationship with her sister, and herself. Judith is not the paragon Cassandra has turned her into, the brilliant musician tied down by convention, the all-important other half Cassandra cannot live without - she is her own person, fully fleshed-out, with her own desires and needs and her own take on their family.
The issues I had with the book have nothing to do with the story itself, which is why I have not included them in my rating. But there is a weird perspective that comes with reading a book decades (as opposed to a century or more later, when you can look at it with the distance of history) after it was written, and that affected my enjoyment of Cassandra at the Wedding. It’s impossible to talk about this without spoilers, so:
Cassandra is a lesbian, which isn’t a huge part of the story but it is important. Some of the disdain Cassandra feels for Judith’s choice to enter a conventional life as a doctor’s wife comes from her disgust with men and with the idea of marriage. I liked getting to read about a lesbian who was messy and promiscuous and often cruel, it’s a huge improvement over the soft, emotionally healthy lesbians of so much contemporary fiction - but given the period when the book was written, I found myself getting distracted by whether Cassandra’s misandry (and possibly incestuous feelings for Judith) were meant to be characteristic of her as an individual or traits of her queerness. There was also the fact that she is clearly mentally ill. The story doesn’t ever link the two explicitly, and in a modern book, again, it wouldn’t bother me. But that brings me to my second point. To a modern reader, Cassandra is probably bipolar, but that isn’t the context she lives in. Though she is undergoing “analysis” and is taking psychiatric medication, these seem to be detriments more than aids in her life; she eventually uses her (clearly overprescribed) medication to attempt suicide, and though her psychiatrist is an interesting character in her own right, there isn’t much sense that she’s helped Cassandra at all. In what turns out to be the key emotional moment of the story, the psychiatrist essentially calls Cassandra a coward for her refusal to get her shit together and learn how to live as a separate person from Judith. Which is interesting and true! But it has the effect of dismissing her real experience of what seems to be a mental illness; Cassandra can’t just “get over” her problems and no one seems able to help her figure out how to handle them.
Cassandra is a graduate student in the 1960’s, traveling home to attend the wedding of her identical twin sister, Judith. From the start it is clear that Cassandra isn’t happy about the wedding - even more so than most identical twins, Cassandra sees Judith as her other half, her soulmate, and she isn’t just jealous or sad about losing her sister: she believes she and Judith made an agreement to live their whole lives together, as partners, and that Judith has violated that agreement. But Cassandra is sure that if she can just speak to her sister before the wedding, she can fix this. All this may sound a little intense, but when we meet the Edwards family, it becomes clear why they are like this. The twins grew up on a remote farm with their brilliant, artistic parents, who raised them to love the music and literature their peers knew nothing about. Cut off by their upbringing from their peers, Cassandra and Judith were bound tightly together, and while Judith may have made a step beyond the family circle by becoming engaged, it is clear that she, too, feels the intense connection. But she is still determined to break free and go her own way, and in the face of that, Cassandra must take drastic action.
The strength of this book is in the characterization and the use of the narrative voice. Cassandra narrates the majority of the story, and she is a fascinating character. Intelligent, dramatic, mercurial, but also plagued with self-doubt and impulsiveness, Cassandra is a master at presenting her story as she sees it. Through Cassandra’s eyes, we are introduced to the Edwards family in all their brilliance; to the loving and devoted relationship between the sisters; to the sense that Cassandra and Judith are meant to be different and special. I would not go so far as to call Cassandra an unreliable narrator - she is not deliberately withholding anything from the audience; indeed, I’m not sure she’d even be capable of that - but her perspective is distinct. And at a key moment, when the narrative shifts from her to Judith, we are made to question how she has presented her family, her relationship with her sister, and herself. Judith is not the paragon Cassandra has turned her into, the brilliant musician tied down by convention, the all-important other half Cassandra cannot live without - she is her own person, fully fleshed-out, with her own desires and needs and her own take on their family.
The issues I had with the book have nothing to do with the story itself, which is why I have not included them in my rating. But there is a weird perspective that comes with reading a book decades (as opposed to a century or more later, when you can look at it with the distance of history) after it was written, and that affected my enjoyment of Cassandra at the Wedding. It’s impossible to talk about this without spoilers, so:
Content Warnings
Graphic: Alcoholism, Medical content, and Suicide attempt
The main character and several others are alcoholics and many characters are drunk through a large part of the story.
Suicide warning: The main character attempts suicide through an overdose and a significant part of the story centers on the medical treatment to save her life and her recovery.