I first read Barbara Trapido's sparkling coming-of-age novel Brother of the More Famous Jack when it was published in 1982. I was in my 20s, on bedrest during a difficult first pregnancy that coincided with the publication of my first novel — which was in part about a failed college relationship. Trapido's debut, about a smart-but-inexperienced young woman with a tendency to fall for the wrong guys, was just the ticket.
I loved Brother of the More Famous Jack and am freshly enamored each time it's rediscovered by a new generation and celebrated with a new edition. The latest, published in October by New York Review Books' Classics imprint, features a misleading cover photograph that transmits a melancholy vibe from the 1980s rather than swinging late '60s London, when much of Trapido's novel is set -- but don't let that put you off.
It is hard not to fall in love with Katherine Browne, Trapido's eager to please, mini-skirted narrator. In her determination to break away from her stiflingly conventional, bourgeois upbringing and forge a less constrained life, Katherine is always game for adventure. By her own admission, she's "no good at making a fuss," and considers others' shocking behavior part of her education.
Katherine finds the chaotic, profane, unabashedly carnal family of her university philosophy professor particularly instructive — and liberating. Drawn to their "bold, radical iconoclasm," she becomes infatuated with them all: the chauvinistic, leftwing patriarch, Jacob Goldman, a German Jewish refugee who later says of her college admissions interview, "The best legs I interviewed that year"; his wife, Jane, a blue-eyed madonna in Wellingtons who broke with her patrician Anglo-Irish family to marry him; and their two irreverent oldest sons, who, when exasperated, throw garlic bread at their father's head and call their mother a "dominating virago." When Katherine first visits the Goldmans on the eve of their sixth child's home birth, their conversation encompasses Jacob's graphic reasons for eschewing various methods of birth control and their small daughter's description of how the baby will arrive. A shocked but enchanted Katherine notes: "There is more sex education about than I have encountered in all my life."
Trapido was born in Cape Town, South Africa in 1941 and left for England in 1963. She was 40 when she wrote her first novel — married to an Oxford professor, raising two children, and working on a never-finished dissertation on the poetry of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The book's 50 short, punchy chapters, packed with incident, argument, sex, and snappy dialogue, convey a delight with turmoil.
Unlike so many debuts, Trapido's is not autobiographical. Six novels have followed, three of which spin an elaborate web involving some of the same characters: Temples of Delight, Juggling and, the closest to a sequel, The Traveling Hornplayer. Her later novels, including her most autobiographical Frankie and Stankie — about two sisters growing up in cruelly racist, apartheid South Africa — are on the whole bleaker and sadder than Brother of the More Famous Jack.
Many of Trapido's novels feature close pairs of brothers or sisters, though Katherine is an only child charmed by the mess and mayhem of the Goldbergs' lively household. The brother referred to in its title is the poet William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), older sibling of the artist Jack Butler Yeats (1871-1957). It's a Goldman family joke, for who's heard of Jack Butler Yeats now? Leitmotifs in Trapido's work include classical music, Jane Austen's Emma, and Shakespeare's comedies involving mistaken identities and doubles. Other throughlines are concerns with social class, mental health, what used to be called the battle of the sexes, and love affairs both passionate and devastating.
Brother of the More Famous Jack, which the Times Literary Supplement has called "a sort of bohemian Brideshead Revisited," has become a darling of writers. Lily King calls it "literary comfort food." Rachel Cusk deems this tale of the disillusions of love "brilliantly lewd" and "hilariously satisfying." Mystery book author Mick Herron, in his introduction to this latest edition, declares Trapido's subject "the eroticism of the intellect." In the enthusiastic foreword to Riverhead's 2014 edition, Maria Semple, fresh off her own success with the charming Where'd You Go Bernadette, calls it "a thrill of contradictions...endearing and shocking... romantic and raunchy...loving and rude." Read whatever version you can get your hands on.
Copyright 2026 NPR