Barbara Trapido’s Brother of the More Famous Jack has stayed in print since 1982 without quite becoming famous. Sam Knight explains its unusual afterlife: the novel keeps moving from readers who adore it to readers who have never heard of it.
Trapido wrote as an outsider to the English world she portrayed:
- She grew up in South Africa in a German-speaking family, then moved to England in 1963.
- Her Oxford home became a gathering place for South African political exiles and thinkers opposed to apartheid.
- Motherhood and domestic work pushed writing to the night; she returned to the manuscript at the kitchen table after everyone else was asleep.
- She composed aloud, staging scenes through voices, rhythm, entrances, exits, and the physical placement of objects.
That method gave the Goldman family its noisy immediacy. Their bohemian, left-wing household offers the novel’s timid outsider a freer way to live, while Trapido’s comic lightness carries deeper themes of displacement, emigration, grief, and lost innocence.
The essay is also a story of literary influence. Trapido helped Maggie O’Farrell finish and publish her first novel, and her own seven books now form a loosely connected “Trapido-verse.” At eighty-four, she can still hear the Goldmans’ voices—and may yet write them another chapter.