CASSANDRA AT THE WEDDING (226 pp.)Dorothy BakerHouqhton 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...