One v. Two

CASSANDRA AT THE WEDDING (226 pp.)--Dorothy Baker--Houqhton Mifflin ($4).

When Dorothy Baker published Young Man with a Horn (1938), the thinly disguised story of the great jazz trumpeter Bix Beiderbecke, expectations for her future ran high. The book evoked the bravura of the jazz cult with dash and devotion, if also a dash of sentimentalism. Her two subsequent novels remained merely promising. Cassandra is her long-awaited fourth novel, written 24 years after her first, and presumably a mature work. It is a crushing disappointment.

The story concerns Cassandra Edwards' neurotic, domineering attachment for her twin sister Judith. Judy leaves the family ranch in Southern California to study music in the East, returns a year later with a fiance in tow. Cass, studying for a Ph.D. at Berkeley, is panic-stricken. She rushes home to break up the engagement, intends to regain possession of her less brilliant but saner sister's soul, and go off with her, far away, to live happily ever after. When other methods fail, Cass attempts suicide. But Judith and her young man, already secretly married, save her life and their own happiness. Cassandra returns to her highly refined academic loneliness. The book ends with a heavy-footed symbolism--Cass tosses one of her socks off the Golden Gate Bridge, realizing, presumably, that individuality must in the end triumph over twinism.

The book flirts fashionably with incest and inversion (Cass has a curiously susceptible lady psychiatrist); the style is full of mannerisms and cultural snobberies, e.g., people are not openmouthed but bouche-bee. And how is the reader to care about a heroine who says, "Just give me the coup de grace and then have the grace to leave graciously"?

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