Barbara Trapido's 1982 Debut Returns in NYRB Classics Edition

New York Review Books' Classics imprint republished Barbara Trapido's debut novel Brother of the More Famous Jack in October, the latest in a string of rediscoverations stretching back four decades. The 1982 coming-of-age story has now appeared in multiple editions, including Riverhead's 2014 printing with a foreword by Maria Semple.

Why does this 1982 novel keep coming back?

Each new edition finds a fresh generation of readers. The novel's narrator, Katherine Browne, is a smart, inexperienced young woman escaping a conventional bourgeois upbringing in swinging late-1960s London. Katherine, by her own admission, is "no good at making a fuss." She treats others' shocking behavior as part of her education.

That education accelerates when she meets the family of her university philosophy professor, Jacob Goldman, a German Jewish refugee and chauvinistic left-wing patriarch. Of Katherine's admissions interview, Jacob later says: "The best legs I interviewed that year." His wife, Jane, broke with her patrician Anglo-Irish family to marry him; their two oldest sons throw garlic bread at their father's head and call their mother a "dominating virago." On the eve of the Goldmans' sixth child's home birth, a shocked but enchanted Katherine observes: "There is more sex education about than I have encountered in all my life."

Katherine is drawn to the family's "bold, radical iconoclasm." In short: the novel converts domestic chaos into comedy, and readers have kept returning to it for over forty years.

Who is Barbara Trapido?

Trapido was born in Cape Town, South Africa, in 1941 and left for England in 1963. She wrote her first novel at 40, while married to an Oxford professor, raising two children, and working on a never-finished dissertation on the poetry of Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

Six novels have followed. Three — Temples of Delight, Juggling, and The Traveling Hornplayer — spin an elaborate web around some of the same characters. Her most autobiographical novel, Frankie and Stankie, about two sisters growing up in apartheid South Africa, is bleaker in tone than her debut.

Despite its confessional voice, Brother of the More Famous Jack is not autobiographical. Trapido's recurring motifs include classical music, Jane Austen's Emma, and Shakespeare's comedies of mistaken identities, alongside concerns with social class, mental health, and passionate, devastating love affairs.

What does the title mean?

The brother of the more famous Jack is the poet William Butler Yeats (1865–1939), older sibling of the artist Jack Butler Yeats (1871–1957). The title is a Goldman family joke — who has heard of Jack Butler Yeats now?

The Times Literary Supplement has called the novel "a sort of bohemian Brideshead Revisited," and contemporary writers remain its most vocal champions:

• Lily King calls it "literary comfort food."
• Rachel Cusk deems the tale of love's disillusions "brilliantly lewd" and "hilariously satisfying."
• Mick Herron, introducing the new edition, declares Trapido's subject "the eroticism of the intellect."
• Maria Semple, in her 2014 foreword for Riverhead, calls it "a thrill of contradictions...endearing and shocking... romantic and raunchy...loving and rude."

The NYRB edition's cover photograph, reviewers note, transmits a melancholy 1980s vibe at odds with the late-'60s London of the novel's setting — a minor flaw in an otherwise welcome reissue. The book's 50 short chapters, packed with incident, argument, sex, and snappy dialogue, convey what one reader describes as a delight with turmoil. Whatever version readers can find, this latest edition confirms the novel's place in the contemporary canon.

By Elena Vasquez