The Constant Rediscovery of the Cult Novelist Barbara Trapido

A story crystallized. A girl—Katherine—from a prim, quiet, middle-class home would enter the bohemian, rude world of the Goldmans. She would fall in love, or some version of it. Later, when the novel was published, critics compared it to the “Pursuit of Love,” by Nancy Mitford, for its sharp depiction of a raucous family. But, whereas Mitford used the figure of an outsider to write about her own milieu, here Trapido herself was the interloper, writing about a society that was foreign to her. Everyone just assumed she was English. “I think, Can’t you tell that I’m an outsider?” she said. “I’m just doing anthropology.”

Because Trapido wrote out loud, the book took on an incantatory quality. “I just kept rapping it out while I pushed swings, while I was riding my bike,” she said. “I’d find I was at the railway station when I was meant to be at the chemist’s.” By the time she sent the manuscript to Jonathan Cape, a publishing house in London, Trapido could recite the entire book. She called it “Brother of the More Famous Jack,” a quip, made in the novel by Jacob Goldman, about W. B. Yeats’s younger brother, who was a painter. “The title was pretty random, really,” she said.

Cape rejected the novel immediately. Six months later, one of Trapido’s friends suggested that she try Victor Gollancz, a less fashionable but more heterodox publisher, which accepted “Jack” and barely changed a word. Trapido was asked to send a letter describing herself, which was published, to her embarrassment, on the book’s back cover: “I wrote my novel through many nights, at the kitchen table, in my fortieth year, having never before had the presumption.”

“Brother of the More Famous Jack” has been in print since 1982, and will be reissued by NYRB Classics this week. Like other perfect but not extremely famous novels, it has mostly been passed from people who adore it to people who have never heard of it. Trapido didn’t show the manuscript to her parents until it was about to go to the printer. Her mother was convinced that no one would publish it, because the language was so appalling. Her father said that he had found four spelling mistakes.

“That was all he said. So I don’t know what he thought of it, really,” Trapido told me, in one of two long conversations we had in Oxford this summer. She moved out of the house on Southmoor Road after Stanley died, in 2008, to a smaller place nearby, which backs onto a canal. Trapido sat on a sofa in her front room, facing a large brick fireplace. The walls were filled with paintings by her son and her granddaughter; classical music played through the radio. She is eighty-four and slyly funny. When I asked questions, she gave answers that were wildly long and circumlocutory, filled with reminiscences of absolute concreteness—the house that she used to walk past on her way to school in Durban; dressing up as Alice in Wonderland; buying oranges from a racist greengrocer in London in the seventies; people’s teeth and the clothes they wore—and which always swerved, unexpectedly and at the last moment, into precisely considered responses. As she spoke, Trapido often closed her eyes, raised her knees slightly, and brought her hands to the side of her head, as if to enter the anecdote more fully. Her son’s terrier, Beanie, snored quietly nearby. Trapido understood why everyone always asks her about “Jack,” even though she maintains that some of her six other novels are better. “I still quite like it,” she said fondly.

People remember where they were when they read “Brother of the More Famous Jack.” Mick Herron, the author of the “Slough House” spy novels, was an undergraduate at Oxford when the book was published. He saw the mostly rapturous reviews in the newspapers (the book won a Whitbread Prize for fiction) and read “Jack” in his top-floor bedroom, a few streets from where Trapido lived. “The verve was there right from the beginning,” Herron told me. (He wrote the introduction to the NYRB edition.) “But also it’s the subject matter. It is a kind of bohemian life style that she’s dangling as a possibility, the idea of running away and joining the circus.”