Consider the Marshmallow: Cassandra at the Wedding and the Boyle’s Law Novel

In chemistry, Boyle’s law describes the inversely proportional relationship, in a gas, between volume and pressure. As the volume of a gas increases, its pressure decreases, and vice versa. Demonstrations of Boyle’s law occasionally feature balloons or shaving cream, but most often they involve a marshmallow inside a syringe. A syringe with a stopper valve creates a vacuum. When the plunger of the syringe is depressed—when the volume decreases—the marshmallow, which is filled with pockets of gas, becomes shriveled and much less festive. The withered husk of confectionery stands as sad and vivid testament to the increased pressure inside the syringe.

Conceptually speaking, Boyle’s law can be relevant to the study of the novel because novels are systems with interdependent elements, and the novelist must always negotiate this relationship between volume and pressure. In the case of the novel, we might say that volume equals time. Time, not physical space, is the container in which a novel occurs. The novelist’s choice about temporal scope—when does the drama begin and when does it end?—determines its relative volume. Almost every novel is analogous to that marshmallow in a syringe (where marshmallow equals character). A book about a fifty-year-old protagonist does not dramatize fifty years; rather, the novelist finds ways to decrease volume, creating a time scheme that exerts withering dramatic pressure. Even (or perhaps especially) a sprawling, multigenerational novel requires temporal compression. But as readers we never feel the volume/pressure dynamic as acutely as in novels of small scope.

Boyle’s law novels, in which high dramatic pressure is palpably and inextricably a function of reduced time, are books that take place in just a few days, a weekend, an evening or afternoon. To name just a few: Paula Fox’s Desperate Characters and The Widow’s Children, Glenway Wescott’s The Pilgrim Hawk, Saul Bellow’s Seize the Day, John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, Ian McEwan’s Saturday and On Chesil Beach, Donald Antrim’s The Hundred Brothers and The Verificationist, even Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City. In these novels the author has contrived to begin the book very close, in time, to its climactic events. We often get flashback, a crucial sense of history—and occasionally an expansive coda—but the container of the key dramatic events is small, and correspondingly, the pressure is high.

Dorothy Baker’s 1962 novel Cassandra at the Wedding, which takes place over perhaps ninety-six hours, is an exemplar of the low-volume/high-pressure novel. In the opening pages, Cassandra leaves Berkeley, where she is a graduate student, and drives home to the family ranch for the wedding of her identical twin sister, Judith. Their mother has died; their father is warm but disengaged; their grandmother is loving but unfailingly proper. It is a journey, but not a quest. Cassandra, who narrates sections one and three (Judith narrates the middle section), moves forward not with ambitious agency, but with profound reluctance and anxiety. She feels, almost literally, that she and Judith are two halves of a single being, and thus her sister’s imminent wedding threatens to dissolve not only the sororal bond, but also Cassandra’s precarious identity.

In a novel with a large scope, the protagonist often moves through time in a series of causally linked, desire-driven episodes. This kind of protagonist, a wanter, pushes the book, advances it. In the short-span novel, however, this propulsive desire is often inverted. The desire is not positive (to achieve, find, or solve), but negative (to extricate or avoid). The protagonist wants something not to happen. This not wanting is a powerful form of wanting, but it creates a different kind of structural logic. It means that the character is pulled unwillingly through the book by the gravity of an impending event or an unprocessed truth. Fear and dread, rather than yearning or need, are the animating emotions. The looming back wall of the narrative container, the novel’s point B—in this case, the wedding announced...