BROTHER OF THE MORE FAMOUS JACK, by Barbara Trapido
One of the best things about Richard Holmes’s recent biography of Alfred, Lord Tennyson was learning that, for Tennyson’s sisters, to “shuckle” meant to have an intense highbrow conversation, and to “sloth” meant to go to ground alone with a book.
Tennyson’s sisters came to mind while I was reading Barbara Trapido’s novel “Brother of the More Famous Jack,” first published in 1982 and reissued now for the first time in decades. In part, this is because Trapido’s novel is about a big academic-bohemian family that teems with siblings, combative and otherwise.
It’s also because the shuckling on display is so good — so literate, funny, cruel and eccentric — that I slothed with this endearing novel immediately and was chagrined to have to climb out. This book is ideally short, yet one wants to live inside it, in the charmed parenthesis it opens inside the daily grind.
It’s the sort of world in which, to pluck an example nearly at random, someone will open a kitchen cabinet, search in vain for something to eat, and complain back over his shoulder, “Your cupboards are full of Polish earlobes in tins.”
Trapido was born in South Africa in 1941, after her parents fled Germany in the face of surging antisemitism. She’s lived in England since 1963. She’s published seven novels, the most notable of which is this one.
Its awkward and hard-to-remember title — it’s an allusion to William Butler Yeats’s brother, Jack, a talented painter — may have kept the book from developing the audience it deserves. But it’s here again now. We should have been talking about Barbara Trapido all along.
I have a special fondness for novels about young people who grow up in narrow cultural circumstances, with few books in the house or paintings on the walls, who sense there is another way of living and find it by being befriended, or nearly adopted, by unconventional and urbane others. It’s my own story, in a way, and it’s why “One of Ours” is my favorite Willa Cather novel, instead of “My Ántonia.” “Brother of the More Famous Jack” is an ornament to this genre.
It’s about Katherine, a young middle-class woman, the daughter of a greengrocer, who makes it to university and falls in with her philosophy professor’s sprawling family. Alongside her, we meet the Goldmans. The powerful left-wing professor is Jacob, a big ball of a man, hairier than a bonobo, a Jew with “a huge cockney voice full of glottal stops, like a plumber’s mate.”
His manner of storming through the world is tempered by Jane, his more gently bred but no less unconventional wife. Their six children have been allowed to grow like weeds. In their large and chaotic house, manuscripts and newsprint are scattered about, telephone messages are written on the kitchen wall, nearly everyone sings or plays music and — the best part of this novel — no conversational topic is off limits: sex, death, religion, money. Here’s another typical shard of dialogue: “I’m a socio-gynecological disaster, Jake.”
“Brother of the More Famous Jack” is a knowing shakedown of social class in England. Katherine confronts (and often enough defends) what Nancy Mitford would describe as her non-U upbringing: her eye makeup, silver bracelets, women’s magazines, overly polished shoes, textbooks covered in wrapping paper, white tennis togs, adolescence spent reading Nevil Shute novels and a good deal of public knitting.
Hers is a culinary awakening, too. “My understanding of foreign foods at that time was limited to the conviction that paprika in the stew made it Hungarian and tinned cocktail fruits made it Caribbean,” Katherine remarks. Among her new friends is a worldly gay man who “is a kind of gastronomic Lionel Trilling and likes to pursue every morsel down his throat with analysis and appraisal.”
Hearts are broken in this novel. Bad, surprising things happen. Katherine weeps nearly as much as Juliet Stevenson does in “Truly, Madly, Deeply.” I won’t give much away (it’s safe to read on), but she gets caught between her romantic feelings for two of the older brothers, who are nearly her age.
The action takes place across more than a decade. Katherine spends years teaching in Italy, where she has a sexual awakening and falls in with virile, right-wing lover, before returning to England. The Italian interlude is a visceral one, and so are the observations:
Unmarried men in southern Europe have mothers. Strong, frank matriarchs, who nose one out as a subversive within minutes, who make perfectly clear the reality that their sons will not make injudicious, long-term attachments with bookish, unconventional, Protestant women: women who have no reputable dowry and insufficient deference for the art of homemade fettuccine.
When in distress, Katherine rereads Jane Austen’s “Emma,” and it is often called for. She thinks hard about what she really thinks and what she really wants, which is to survive on her own wits.
The dialogue is Stoppard-level. If these characters were dogs, they would be constantly lifting their legs at one another. But hassling, most of the time, is how they express their love.
“Brother of the More Famous Jack” (I’m tired of even typing the title) strikes me as a pocket classic, a book that takes life seriously, earns its emotions and befriends the reader without getting all gooey about anything at all.
BROTHER OF THE MORE FAMOUS JACK | By Barbara Trapido | New York Review Books | 239 pp. | Paperback, $17.95
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