Oh, poor Cassandra of Dorothy Baker's 1962 novel Cassandra at the Wedding, recently brought back into print by The New York Review of Books. Cassandra, a graduate student at Berkeley, has harbored dreams of spending her adult life with her identical twin sister Judith. The siblings have shared an apartment in Berkeley in the past, and Judith once remarked that the two of them should move to Paris together and pursue careers in the arts. But that was before Judith went off to study music on the East Coast where she met the man whom she has decided to marry. His name is John Thomas Finch, and he is a doctor from Connecticut of seemingly spotless character. He does not appear to have a single fault, not a speck of interesting meanness. Baker, who in real life was married with children, decided to give all of the obvious character flaws to Cassandra, who is a lesbian. The heroine of this novel is not only neurotic, self-absorbed and suicidal, she is also sexually inappropriate with the therapist who is trying to help her.

I found it hard, however, to blame Cassandra for her mental difficulties since, when she goes home for her sister's wedding, she is surrounded by a group of people who at first seem eccentric but turn out to be maddeningly bland. About twenty pages into the book, I stopped caring about any of the characters and started reading with detachment. I found myself watching the novel rather than experiencing it. Maybe I should have expected this sort of read since I did purchase the book on the basis of a blurb on the back cover from Carson McCullers in which McCullers praises Baker for her pyrotechnics: "I – whose usual bedtime is ten o'clock – stayed up all night reading that exquisite Cassandra at the Wedding – dazzled by the pyrotechnics of such an artist."

Baker's writing can be as spectacular as fireworks, but it wasn't too far into the book that I remembered what I usually forget until July – that I'm ambivalent about fireworks. Cassandra, who narrates the first and last sections of the book, is a chemical compound of a character – part mental fragility, part erudition, part homophobic stereotype. Her narration often explodes in a sizzle of words. The effect, while brilliant on the surface, lacks subtlety and soon grows tiresome. These passages furthermore are accompanied by an annoying boom that keeps announcing for the crowds, Fallible Narrator!