A story materialized. A girl from a staid, quiet, middle-class family – Catherine – would enter the bohemian, rough world of Goldman Sachs. She will fall in love, or some form of love. Later, when the novel was published, critics compared it to Nancy Mitford’s “The Pursuit of Love” for its poignant depiction of a tumultuous family. But while Mitford uses the figure of the outsider to describe her own milieu, Trapido herself is the interloper here, describing a society that is foreign to her. Everyone thought she was British. “I wonder, can’t you see that I’m an outsider?” she said. “I’m just doing anthropology.”
Because Trapido writes out loud, the book takes on a spell-like quality. “I was pushing the swing and riding my bike, and I was banging it,” she said. “When I was supposed to be at the pharmacy, I found myself at the train station.” By the time she sent the manuscript to Jonathan Cape Publishing in London, Trapido could recite the entire book. She called it “Brother of the More Famous Jack,” a quip from Jacob Goldman’s novel about WB Yeats’s painter brother. “The title is really random,” she said.
Cape rejected the novel out of hand. Six months later, a friend in Trapido suggested she try Victor Gollancz, a less fashionable and more unorthodox publisher that took “Jack” and barely changed a word. Trapido was asked to send a letter describing herself, which, to her embarrassment, was published on the back cover of the book: “I spent many evenings at the kitchen table writing my novel at the age of forty, and had never had such assumptions before.”
Better Known as Jack’s Brother has been in print since 1982 and will be reissued this week by NYRB Classics. Like other perfect but not very famous novels, it mostly passed from people who loved it to people who had never heard of it. Trapido did not show the manuscript to her parents until it was about to go to press. Her mother was convinced that no one would publish it because the language was so terrible. Her father said he discovered four spelling errors.
“That’s all he said. So I don’t really know how he felt about it,” Trapido told me, in one of two long conversations we had in Oxford this summer. After Stanley’s death in 2008, she moved out of the South Moor Road house into a smaller property nearby, which backed on to the canal. Trapido sat on a couch in the front room, facing a large brick fireplace. The walls are covered with paintings by his son and granddaughter; classical music plays on the radio. She’s eighty-four and slyly funny. When I pose the question, her responses are extremely long and circuitous, full of absolutely specific memories – the house she once walked past on her way to school in Durban; dressing up as Alice in Wonderland; buying oranges from a racist greengrocer’s shop in London in the Seventies; people’s teeth and the clothes they wore – and always unexpectedly morphing into a carefully considered response at the last minute. Trapido often closes his eyes while speaking, raising his knees slightly and placing his hands by the side of his head, as if to enter more fully into the anecdote. Her son’s beagle, Beanie, snores quietly nearby. Trapido understands why everyone keeps asking her about “Jack,” even though she insists some of her other six novels are better. “I still love it,” she said fondly.
People will remember where they were when they read “Better Jack’s Brother.” Mick Herron, the author of the spy novel Slough House, was an undergraduate at Oxford University when the book was published. He read the most glowing reviews in the newspapers (the book won the Whitbread Prize for Fiction) and read “Jack” in his attic bedroom a few streets away from where Trapido lived. “There was energy from the beginning,” Herron told me. (He wrote the introduction for the NYRB version.) “But that’s also the theme. It’s a bohemian lifestyle that she plays with as a possibility, the idea of running away and joining the circus.”