If you are not familiar with the Emily Books Book Club, or simply have that condition where you struggle to form short-term memories, you may click here. Maybe you already did! This month, Emily and I read and discussed Dorothy Baker’s Cassandra at the Wedding (discount code, as always, at the bottom of the post) and had a tiny fight about Sylvia Plath.
Emily – Oh, hello there!
Nicole – HI EMILY, this is the best book.
Emily – I’m so glad you loved it. This, bizarrely, is one I had to be talked into by Ruth!
Nicole – What is wrong with you? jk SORT OF
Emily – A lot? I don’t remember, actually, why I wasn’t crazy about it the first time I read it. Maybe it was that it had “wedding” in the title? I honestly don’t know. On second reading, I loved it. And loved Cassandra.
Nicole – I loved her too. Some reviews call her “evil,” which I cannot abide.
Emily – Well, those people are homophobes!
Nicole – YES. Also, I pictured her looking like a young Lionel Shriver. That’s interesting, too, how on one hand you worry that having a clearly deranged gay protagonist in the 60s is cliché, and then it turns out to be a very very sympathetic portrait. AND that Vera flies out to see her, and that she is not supposed to find love with a man.
Emily – What’s your favorite part?
Nicole – I think when she shows them her dress (the dress she selects for herself turns out to be the exact same one that her sister (THE BRIDE) has chosen as a wedding dress) and they just…go silent. And placing the call from the emergency phone, and when she says that some people cannot imagine being in love with a black velvet curtain (DEATH).
Emily – That part reminded me a lot of The Bell Jar, which actually came out later than this book!
Nicole – INTERESTING. This is so much better than the stupid bell jar.
Emily – Actually a lot of Cassandra’s interiority struck me as Esther Greenwood-y, but maybe that’s just how people talked (in their minds) back then? Omg you did not just diss The Bell Jar.
Nicole – I DID
Emily – The Bell Jar’s great, Nicole
Nicole – No, I only read it last year, it was too late for me.
Emily – huh! I reread it recently and liked it a lot more than I did as a teen
Nicole – I think I just do not like Plath, and brought in my own baggage, because I think Ted Hughes is a vastly superior poet.
Emily – Omg stop.
Nicole – Although a bag of dicks, I’m sure.
Emily – And a serial killer? Ha um we don’t have to have that conversation right now
Nicole – Let’s table it for another time, though. But, Cassandra! Cassandra is the best.
Emily – Sorry yes. Cassandra!
Nicole – SHE IS THE BEST. The refusal to ever once say “twin” in this book. Her horror of being called twins.
Emily – Okay I’m so sorry to do this but I’m going to bring Sylvia back into this
Nicole – I’ll allow it, but you better connect it up.
Emily – You know the idea of having a “good” and “bad” version of yourself was also something SP wrote about a lot
Nicole – Yes, fair.
Emily – and Cassandra and … I’m sorry, I don’t even remember her name because she’s so vanilla are a very clear take on that theme
Nicole – Judith. NOTE that she occasionally calls her Jude
Emily – There’s something fun and gothic about the idea of twins as halves of a divided whole
Nicole – LIKE THE LOST CAUSE SHE IS. Absolutely. The platonic flat fish
Emily – Poor Judith. “I’m going to get married and a big strong man will fix everything” good luck Judith
Nicole – He seems…nice. I like that he’s so flat. Like, we’re not supposed to hate him, but he’s about a thousandth as interesting as anyone else in the book.
Emily – Even Judith is interesting because, bland as she is, she’s bland in a real way
Nicole – As opposed to the doctor, whose name I have now forgotten in my turn: “What shall we hang on that wall? blah blah.” Agreed.
Emily – the way people choose to be bland when their families are TOO interesting.
Nicole – Bland, and also diving into being conventional. Having seen the end game of the alternative. OH, JANE. The dead mother.
Emily – the writer! Whose shadow Cassandra lives in.
Nicole – Yes.
Emily – I guess that is a detail from the author’s life. she also wrote a thesis about French women novelists, and luckily years later she also wrote this book
Nicole – And her husband says Cass and Jude are totally based on her and her daughters
Emily – That’s so creepy.
Nicole – Completely creepy.
Emily – “Our daughters, who are halves of a divided whole and somewhat in thwarted love” Um do you want to know what my favorite part is? it’s when Cassandra, recovering from her (spoiler but not really) suicide attempt, halfheartedly tries to seduce Vera, her therapist
Nicole – I love that too.
Emily – It’s so perfect.
Nicole – Vera Mercer, in general. So great.
Emily – She seems like a good therapist! Um, kind of.
Nicole – I love those glimpses of her whole life. no, as a character, I mean
Emily – I wish she hadn’t been such a good therapist and had just gotten into the bed, a bit.
Nicole – the idea that cass has this whole group of lovers and ex-lovers and friends and weirdos back in the city. The quality of the writing is so extraordinary. I could not believe I had literally never heard of an author who writes so plainly and well.
Emily – That whole opening sequence of the car ride through the California desert is virtuosic
Nicole – Stopping for the drink, the sunburn, the open car. Dousing her head at the pump. When she says “sluiced my ear”.
Emily – Everything I like: there isn’t a word too many or a word missing, you learn a ton about the character but you are never TOLD anything. Heather Havrilesky has a funny essay in the new Bookforum where she basically says “novels used to be allowed to be small and we were better off then.” this is a great physically small book. (It could probably be even shorter!) and its ilk has gone out of fashion, she’s right. people expect a big scope now
Nicole – This comes up, actually, in conversation about English novels a lot–That huge sweeping FREEDOM like books are very American and it’s tough for little slice-y English things (cass is very mary Wesley) to compete when awards happen. Because if you have one book that attempts to do THE STORY OF EXISTENCE, a weekend in the life of a woman is harder to have pop. But, then, I guess McEwan does this stuff, with Saturday, etc. But “Cassandra” is gloriously small. I didn’t even want more of it, I was so happy with the Faberge eggyness of it
Emily – I hope the tide will turn against the big books, even though I enjoy a lot of them, too
I would like to see a resurgence of these perfect jeweled Cassandra-style eggs
Nicole – I like and am grateful for the third of the book narrated by Judith. And I am still unsure of whether or not the final third is too upbeat, or correct
Emily – What would you have preferred?
Nicole – I obviously wanted Cassandra to live. I don’t know if I wanted her to totally pull it together and offer her the piano and help with the flowers.
Emily – ha!
Nicole – I don’t know if the answer needed to be her getting her shit together and Judith not changing at all. But, then, what to do?
Emily – Yeah, when you put yourself in the author’s shoes … I know this is not what you’re supposed to do in thinking about books btw
Nicole – Fuck ‘em.
Emily – but I imagine her being really excited about the first half, getting through the Judith bit, and then the third part being like “welp, gotta end it somehow” In a more recent novel I think she would have flashed forward
Nicole – interesting!!
Emily – Cassandra’s living with Vera or someone similar, she’s a writer, Judith calls because she’s having some kind of baby or divorce or crisis, and she’s like “ok, on my way” and gets in her car, and there’s an air of menace like maybe this time she’ll crash
idk, that is one hacky take
at this point the one thing I know I’m really good at is thinking of a LOT of different TERRIBLE ways to end a book
Nicole – I love it. IT WAS ALL A DREAM. Judith is actually her border collie
Emily – endings, man. I sympathize. Just land the plane somehow, aim for as few fatalities as possible. lol, THEY WERE ALWAYS THE SAME PERSON, as in the Brian De Palma movie Sisters. sorry if I just spoiled Sisters for anyone
watch it anyway, it’s awesome
(terrible-awesome)
Nicole – On it. But, no, endings are difficult. And this did have resolution! What I find INTERESTING, here is that little part where Judith says that the only thing that would really “cure” Cass
is for Judith to disintegrate and need Cass to fix her, in which case Cass would get it together instantly. SO, since cass DOES get it together, is it because she thinks that Judith is in some way broken by marrying this clown?
(nice doctor) this is crazy speculation
Emily – I just feel like that gives the book a little bit too much making-sense credit. like, she gets her shit together temporarily because she has no other option in the confines of the book except to die
but I think she does give up on Judith and, wow, how to say this. like, there’s a little bit of that feeling sometimes when you are around someone who’s getting married who you’ve been very close to as a young single person even if you aren’t, like, their lesbian twin, that feeling of “well, she’s gone, moving on.”
(eek, that is dark)
Nicole – Ohh, true. NOPE, it’s a thing.
Emily – it’s why people cry at weddings.
Nicole – Her horror when she sees that Judith is in a low bikini, did you catch that? I thought Judith was pregnant at first, when I read that part. But it’s her horror that Judith is sensually present.
Emily – Cassandra! What a weirdo! She’s a really glamorous weirdo, though
Nicole – YES. With her brandy. And her eggs frothed into more brandy. And obviously looking totally gorgeous 24/7
Emily – I’m trying to think if there is any other female narrator pre-70s outside of pulpier things who is this complex, glamorous, fucked up and self-possessed. Anyway, that’s what the book is about for me. A heroine who is chic and interesting and slightly nuts and not at all about to be rescued by a man–sort of like the Elaine Dundy narrators except they all get rescued by men.
Nicole – She will be rescued by her own awesomeness, and rescued only in the sense she will just kick a shoe off the Golden Gate Bridge.
Emily – goodbye, shoe!
Nicole – OH, the initial mention of the bridge, where it’s just “the view was too appealing”
Emily – so emo (but yeah, that’s great writing) I like a good self-dramatizing narrator
Nicole – What music would Cass like? LET’S SPECULATE. LISA GERMANO
Emily – Yeah, obvi! She drove out there listening to The Con by Tegan and Sara. “I JUST WANT BACK INTO YOUR HEAD”
Nicole – She was not sure how she felt about the new album by T&S, though. Too mainstream, but she gets loaded and dances to “Closer” like everyone else
Emily – oh no. she didn’t really like it much at all
but sure, yeah, for dancing. or getting work done.
Nicole – IS she going to write, now? She might!
She might pick up the thing she left.
Emily – Of course. It might be…the book you just read!
Nicole – BA DAH DAHHHH
Readers of The Toast can take 20% off purchases from Emily Books — subscriptions or individual books — by entering the code CASSIETOAST at checkout until 9/19.
Tags: books, cassandra at the wedding, emily books book club, emily gould, sylvia plath
Because I am very, very behind on my Toast reads, I only just finished The Spare Room (which was great!) and I’m half way through Wolf Hall (I’ve been half way through for a while now but I think it’s because I want to SAVOR it) and anyway THIS IS DEFINITELY NEXT. It sounds so good from this chat. …I’m doing this in the wrong order.
I feel so personally cathected to this book now, and I hadn’t even heard of it a month ago. Thank you so much, Emily for bringing it to my attention! Lots to say, but I’ll start with: THEIR DAD! I LOVE THEIR DAD!
THIS BOOK. I loved it like I haven’t loved a book in a long time. It was so wonderful and exhausting. Judith was so vanilla indeed, but I thought it was wonderful how clearly I was able to imagine how exhausting in both a wonderful and a worrisome way it must have been for her to be Cassandra’s twin.
I just said wonderful a whole lot right there.
YESSSSS this is everything I loved about the book!! And as marvelously unrepetantly fucked up as Cassandra was, I loved Judith and the way she embraced the bland as the only way to cope with her weird family. Of course, she can be as bland as she wants, get as bland a manloaf husband as she can find, but Cassandra is still there and still going to demand outrageous things of Judith like (SPOILER) making her husband spend their wedding day pumping his new sister-in-law’s stomach. Who does that! And I think there was something Judith said or hinted that the first time her husband saw her (Judith’s) naked body was as he was holding Cassandra’s lifeless one while he was pumping her stomach? This book is so quietly twisted, I love it.
Also, every time Cassandra brought up Judith’s bikini, there was so much gorgeous tension and loathing, like she wanted Judith in an untwinly fashion but also couldn’t believe that there was another version of her own body walking around in a trendy little bikini and that body was going to be married and have some GUY all over it. Sibling betrayal and her own body’s betrayal, all at once! Ohhhhhmygod.
Nicole, I agree with you about everything to do with Ted Hughes, and I’mma let you finish, but The Bell Jar is one of the most perfect novels about the psychological state of women in post-war America of all time
geez i'd love to read a sylvia plath debate between you. and i'd also love to re-read the bell jar now, because i realize after reading this that i'm SURE i must have romanticized it alot… but i suspect i'd also still like it quite a bit, but for different reasons? i wonder if i'd think she was overrated now? well, the bell jar anyway. it's so hard to have a PURE, uninfluence opinion on sylvia plath, is the one thing i am sure of!
I loved this book so intensely, and it echoed so many things I have felt in my own life. it’s hard to intellectualize it, but I’m going to try to be coherent.
I really loved the way that Baker captured that exhausted selfishness of being depressed and screwed up; how Cassandra feels so thwarted by the world, her mother’s legacy, her sister’s pulling away, and how she reacts in selfishness in that intense self-preserving way that felt so genuine to me.
I also loved how the whole book is haunted by the dead mother, and how her studio behind the house is a sort of spectral presence, both a part and not of the family home. It felt ever so slightly Shirley Jackson to me. I love how Baker plays with that tension of being a part of and apart from all the way through.
I’m so glad other people love Cassandra too. I was so worried that everyone would hate her, but I love rooting for her and all her wounded fucked up displaced desires.
Also, I think it’s patently ridiculous to talk about Ted Hughes being the better poet as if he didn’t live 35 years longer and had time to develop a greater body of work. What Plath did was necessary and dramatically new for her time, and she had some fucking killer lines. I particularly like the bee poems.
I am with you 100% about everything.
I mean, I know we can only judge poets based on the actual work that we have from them, and not projections about how things could have been, but this pervasive need to compare Plath and Hughes against one another as though poetry is a zero-sum game not informed by history and misogyny seems silly to me.
(Haha, I mean, thanks for agreeing with me! I just came back down here and realized I had more to say.)
I LOVED this book! ! I agree with the Sylvia Path-ness but also think that this was way better than The Bell Jar. I think the length was great but wish that Judith’s section had come a bit sooner in the book, though it made sense with Cass taking the pills. I’ve been taking Emily Books suggestions for awhile now but this is my first real book club discussion participation. I’m so glad The Toast and Emily Books are doing this together!
Thank you, thank you, thank you for introducing me to this book – I devoured it in a day and a half, it’s been ages since something grabbed me and held me to the end the way this book did. Please forgive my scatterbrained thoughts as I literally finished the book 15 minutes ago and am going to prattle on without any self editing here: OH MY GOD IT DELETED MY COMMENT I AM TRYING TO RECONSTRUCT THIS
I found it disappointing that you both pile on to Judith here because what I found so marvelous about this book is Dorothy Baker’s compassion and sympathy for Judith. I generally hate books that talk about neurosis because they either glamorize mental illness or imbue it with some sort of false genius, as though being well-adjusted and interesting are mutually exclusive. This book uses a complex, ruthless, unpredictable protagonist to offer compassion to the conventional characters whom Cassandra dismisses out of hand. Do you really think it’s possible that Judith grew up in this freewheeling house, with the same eccentric education and left-field parents and heady intellectualism, along with her own gift for music and solitude and exotic twin, and somehow managed to shut it off and fall into thoughtless decisionmaking for the rest of her life? I think Baker is showing that while Judith may choose a conventional path, it doesn’t mean her thoughts at arriving at that decision were any less complex or interesting. It’s easy for Cassandra to dismiss Judith at the end as a “very conventional girl” because that’s less painful than acknowledging that the twin she loved, her other half, whose mind Cassandra has always respected (or thought she did) has decided to reject Cassandra’s way of being and choose a different kind of life.
The therapist notes that the way to developing a whole way of being, a complete life, is through “work mostly. Work, and interests, and love.” Who in this book possesses those qualities? Why, that bland doctor whatsisface, John Thomas Finch. Cassandra dismisses him airily as a matter of course, but this is a man who is absolutely passionate about what he does – he comes back from a trip overflowing with excitement about his field, and the tools and techniques he’ll be learning. He can’t turn that part of himself off. He excels at this work. In this way he resembles nobody so much as Cassandra’s mother, her artist friend in Berkeley, even Judith with her music. Baker has a lot of respect for the interiority of so-called conventional people, and it was the most moving aspect of this book to me. In a way, I think she’s pointing out that what might seem widespread conventionality may be arising out of ancient, simple truths, which Judith and her grandmother understand: that there is an inherent value in kindness and goodness and prudence. That sacrificing one’s ego to others or to one’s work may paradoxically build a self. In my mind, Dorothy Baker is doing this marvelous sleight of hand – giving the reader this glamorous and charismatic Cassandra to latch on to, and while we don’t even notice it she builds up a thoughtful, sensitive, self-possessed Judith in the background, as she quietly carries on the work of holding her family together, saving her sister’s life, and preserving her own self against their destructive forces. Cassandra is very memorable, but Judith is the hero of the story.
So, I put off reading this entire post and comment thread till I’d read the book (which I also did quite quickly once I got going–what a treat! And I’m totally on board w/ Nicole and Emily’s short novel discussion), but I’m in 100% agreement here about the love for Judith. I’m sure my take is totally colored by my weekend–I read the book on a flight home to go to the funeral of a dear friend whose fucked-up-ed-ness seems to have gotten the better of her. Ugh. BUUUUT, have some love for the triumph of the conventional. I completely agree with the nod to “ancient, simple truths” above (and I love the phrasing). But yes, Judith loves her family in the best way she knows how, meeting everybody’s needs as well as she can and recognizing her limits. Yes, Cass would like her to crack up and break down and be maiden aunt sisters with her forever. But no, while Judith will make a drunken promise to pitch the dress (and only the dress), she will not actually subjugate her love or her possible life’s work and needs to her family’s eccentricities. Meantime, she gives her grandmother the wedding she wanted, while having already celebrated / consummated her marriage; she differentiates without drama (and a little bit in secret), and let’s everybody get a little more of what they wanted. And opening the gifts for her wedding shower! So selfless and generous, and yet a little sustaining for her too: she likes the chafing dish –> she likes the domesticity that’s staring her down? And later, Cass remarks on the chafing dish in the window, and it’s a sort of vehicle for her own differentiation. . . And can’t we read Judith’s sensitive musical nature and talent as a kind of internalization and maximizing of the erudite potential her family has crammed into her, while also celebrating her ability to pick up and move along when the time is right? Why did she go to Julliard? Maybe to make good on the gifts her upbringing have given her? Also maybe to shove off while the shoving’s good?
It also seems to me that Judith embodies a kind of maturity that Cass resents because she isn’t there yet, and maybe won’t / can’t be. I’m sure that if I had read this book at age 15 (when I basically *was* Cass, minus the drinking, but plus the depression, eating disorder, complicated [but not pseudo-sexual] relationship with shrinks, and a would-be lesbian to boot), I would have hated Judith’s smug little guts. But now, half a lifetime later, I’m different, my life is different, my choices are different, and I recognize the growth, development, and even healing required to make “conventional” choices without rejecting all the complicated pieces of me that went into getting me here. Totally agree that Judith is the real triumph here (plus, she maintains some eccentric individualism, what with the eloping, and the sex in the study, and Dr. JTF exhibits some ability to roll with it in those same moments, to both of their credits). And, now that Judith has demonstrated that she can be the family’s functional center, that she can anchor the next generation, maybe that knowledge can free up Cass from her previous state, unstick her, and help her get to writing. Although God help anybody who’s stuck on her thesis. Because yes. . .
Just read this book last night, and yes, I totally agree with Pcwickup and Amativus that there is a lot to Judith that is interesting and admirable, and at the very least that the reader should be suspicious of the facile judgments passed on her by Vera, the girls’ father, and sometimes by Cassandra. She is the one with the demonstrable talents (swimming, piano). She is notably funny, when she takes a break from working her ass off to soothe and comfort and avoid being eaten up by her crazy sister, as in parts of the bathroom scene. She is smart. And most of all, belying the accusations of being too conventional, she is the one who wants to escape home and family; Cassandra’s inability to let go of her twin shows her clutching at the status quo, at what is comforting and secure, despite the fact that she has convinced herself that an exclusive quasi-romantic relationship with her sister would be brave and singular. Anyway, I think the genius of the book is that the alternating narratives show the accuracies and the weaknesses in each twin’s perspectives on and portrayals of the other. As I finished this I thought about how fascinating it would be to hear which “side” other readers took, between Cassandra and Judith–unfortunately this isn’t that widely read but I will push it on as many of my loved ones as I can because I am so curious about what they say.