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Barbara Trapido\u2019s Brother of the More Famous Jack<\/em>, originally published in 1982 and reissued this year by New York Review Books, opens with its young heroine, Katherine, reading the preface of a book written by her beloved professor, Jacob Goldman:<\/p>\n I cannot in good conscience give the statutory thanks to my wife for helpful comments on the manuscript, patient reading of drafts or corrections to proofs, because Jane did none of these things \u2026 Going by the lavish thanks to wives which I find in the prefaces to other men\u2019s books, I deem myself uniquely injudicious in having married a woman who refuses to double as a high-grade editorial assistant. Since custom requires me to thank her for something, I thank her instead for the agreeable fact of her continuing presence which in twenty years I have never presumed to expect.<\/p>\n \u201cThere is no doubt,\u201d says Katherine, that the preface\u2014the marriage it speaks of and the world it hints at\u2014\u201cinfluenced the paths that I chose to tread.\u201d There are many people who would probably say the same of Brother of the More Famous Jack<\/em>. I read it for the first time when I was sixteen; now, decades later, I find it nearly impossible to disentangle some of my own tastes and preferences from those expressed in the novel. Do I think that having revolting handwriting is glamorous because of Brother of the More Famous Jack<\/em>, or would I have gotten there on my own? Do I think wearing an all-white outfit to play amateur tennis is embarrassing because of the novel, or does that kind of thing become obvious to all adults eventually? I began rereading the novel in preparation for this interview and realized almost immediately that I didn\u2019t need to: I had the whole thing more or less off by heart.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n It is a novel about how to live, or how to be: how to be happy, how to be sad, how to fall in love, how to collapse in a heap when love doesn\u2019t work out. Also: what to wear, what to cook, and what to buy an overconfident but ultimately appealing sixteen-year-old boy for his birthday (a bicycle bell).<\/p>\n The novel begins with Katherine, a nice, conventionally brought-up, middle-class girl, falling in with her professor\u2019s family, so different from her own. There is such a great number of them, to begin with. There is Jacob, the Marxist professor with the ridiculously hairy chest, and Jane, his beautiful, posh wife, who both loves and resents being the mother of six wild children. There are the six wild children, particularly the two eldest boys, Roger and Jonathan, who play different but almost equally significant roles in Katherine\u2019s sentimental education. She is dazzled by the whole family, who are loud and combative and madly sophisticated without being pompous about it or even seeming to set much store by it (\u201c\u200a\u2018I\u2019ll tell you something you\u2019ll hate, shall I?\u2019 I said to him. \u2018You\u2019re cultured \u2026 You always were,\u2019\u200a\u201d gives some idea of the attitude). Books and music and politics and sex and money are all discussed at maximum volume over dinner. It stops Katherine in her suburban tracks. Her life is never the same.<\/p>\n I spoke to Trapido about Brother of the More Famous Jack<\/em> at her house, in Oxford. I was thrilled to discover that she speaks exactly like one of her characters: when making me lunch, she asked if I would like \u201csome dear little tomatoes.\u201d We spoke about structuring a novel, hearing someone say \u201cfuck\u201d for the first time, and being taken for Doris Lessing.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n Could you picture the shape of the book before you started writing it?<\/p>\n BARBARA TRAPIDO<\/p>\n No. You see, I saw no shape. The book is entirely character-based. It progresses via vivid dialogue. Story-wise, it\u2019s simply one episode after another. I began to write it because a friend goaded me. I was chattering out some anecdote and she said, \u201cTell you what gets on my nerves about you. You dissipate your talent by just talking out stories.\u201d I was a bit stung by this because I thought I\u2019d already been working quite hard, schlepping on two buses, from Durham to the Sunderland Docklands, where I worked and taught. She suggested that I write a story for the Guardian<\/em> short-story competition. In the end I said I\u2019d give it a go.<\/p>\n Having dreamt up the Goldman family, I couldn\u2019t get enough of them. I kept being drawn back in. I was wanting all the people in my life to go away and get on. I\u2019d wait till the middle of the night and then creep into this little hide. I didn\u2019t tell anyone what I was doing. My husband, Stanley, believed I was finishing my thesis on the Pre-Raphaelite poets and instead I was getting high on inventing dialogue. So no, I didn\u2019t see any shape for it. I just thought, Well, today they can go to the beach and then they can go to the cinema. I played around with the dialogue and made it shorter and tighter and even sometimes made shapes on the page with it. I had no idea what I was writing, though I quickly realized it wasn\u2019t a short story.<\/p>\n After a while, I recalled that it was something I used to do in childhood\u2014invent people, sometimes write little stories, and think, This is just playing and it\u2019s the best fun. I couldn\u2019t stop doing it. It was only once I\u2019d written quite a bit of it that I thought, Is this a soap opera? What am I doing, and has it got any shape? What\u2019s going to happen to these people? That led to a sort of shape. In hindsight, I realized\u2014and the writing was all entirely intuitive, I didn\u2019t plan any of it\u2014that I\u2019d made a few linking threads of imagery to compensate. The repeating references to Monteverdi, the \u201cHamlet hat,\u201d the older Goldman boy\u2019s initials, appearing and re-appearing in upper case, the embroidered butterfly, the falsetto singing\u2014threads of imagery to weave the novel together. What drives it forward is the energy of its quick-fire dialogue and the wish to keep company with the characters. That is what makes it readable. I\u2019m surprised if people think that it has much in the way of a shape.<\/p>\n INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n Where does the character of Katherine come from? Where does Jacob come from?<\/p>\n TRAPIDO<\/p>\n All the characters came out of the back of my head. None of them are based on real-life people. I find in general that any characters in my books who are real-life people, usually walk-on parts, come out two-dimensional, unlike the imaginary ones. With Katherine, I recalled from my own youth that heady feeling of leaving one\u2019s school days behind, anticipating university, the freedom of being a grown-up.<\/p>\n Jacob and Jane are both wholly unlike anyone I knew. But from my own parents I had a blueprint for a cross-cultural marriage. My dad was more dominant, having gotten where he was via his brain. He grew up dirt-poor and went to Leiden University, in the Netherlands, on one of only eight scholarships that I believe existed at the time. My mum had come from a rather sheltered, calm, bourgeois Berlin household, with holiday homes and skiing in the mountains and a boat on the Wannsee. Her family led sweet, quiet, uneventful lives. They watched the coming of Germany\u2019s fascist dictator with great unease and lost everything as a result of the Second World War. She was very timid and not remotely like Jane, except that she played the piano. Both of my parents were \u201cdisplaced foreigners\u201d in Cape Town, you might say.<\/p>\n In general, the characters in Jack<\/em> are all imagined, archetypal. I suppose I invented them because I wanted some exciting pretend friends. I think I enjoyed their shoutiness. Katherine\u2019s sewing and obsession with clothes was totally me at that age, forever at the sewing machine with those Vogue <\/em>\u201cParis Original\u201d patterns, and getting corrugations in my skull from sleeping in rollers every night to achieve the right undulations in my dead-straight hair.<\/p>\n INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n I\u2019d like to ask you about the preface to Jacob\u2019s book, which appears at the start of the novel.<\/p>\n TRAPIDO<\/p>\n I so enjoyed inventing that. In fact, I was<\/em> one of those bloody wives who edited and annotated, not only for my husband, but for quite a few academic types who tend to write in paragraph-long sentences.<\/p>\n INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n Katherine says that this preface influenced the paths that she chooses to tread. How do you see that happening in the novel?<\/p>\n TRAPIDO<\/p>\n She learns a whole different way of negotiating family life. In a way, the book reads like a seventies pamphlet on progressive child-rearing. And it\u2019s very liberated in that it involves interactions between people with less inhibition about being respectable and tidy. It\u2019s also a bit of an examination of social class, the different pockets of middle-class life \u2026 And of course, I am an outsider, which makes one a bit more of an anthropologist in the way she looks at society.<\/p>\n INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n How do you think that comes through in the novel, your being anthropological?<\/p>\n TRAPIDO<\/p>\n There\u2019s quite an awareness of social class. I think, in general, I\u2019m completely politically obsessed, addicted to newsprint, like Jake.<\/p>\n We once had a lovely lodger who played the piano, a librarian at the Bodleian Library, a rather effete boy called James, who managed to wedge a small grand piano into our little basement studio flat. This was at the time when the Labour Party was trying to supplant Ken Livingstone and impose poor old Frank Dobson in his place as the mayoral candidate\u2014big news day-to-day at the time. \u201cWho\u2019s Ken Livingstone?\u201d James asked me one day, during one of my rants. I thought, I am so envious of you. You don\u2019t have to waste your days fretting about what\u2019s going on, whether it\u2019s the German election or the Labour Party. You are free to think about Dutch landscape paintings and playing the piano.<\/p>\n INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n Do you think Katherine\u2019s political?<\/p>\n TRAPIDO<\/p>\n I think she probably becomes so as a result of the Goldmans. Jane says that Jacob\u2019s so obsessed with newsprint that if he\u2019s away from his copy of the Guardian<\/em>, he\u2019ll look through old chest drawers to see if they\u2019ve been lined with two-year-old issues of the Hampstead and Highgate Gazette<\/em>.<\/p>\n I suppose it\u2019s interesting how quite a lot of English graduates are totally unaware of social class and socioeconomic context. I remember an English fellow, a graduate student, saying, \u201cBut it\u2019s got nothing to do with Wordsworth.\u201d And I thought, But of course it has! The socioeconomic context in which these people grow up and survive\u2014you need to know that in order to appreciate the way that the verse kind of explodes. The times through which these people were living impinges on the way they think and write.<\/p>\n INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n Did you show the novel to your husband or did you keep it to yourself?<\/p>\n TRAPIDO<\/p>\n No. I read bits to my teenage daughter, who relished it. I gave Stan the completed proof copy only after it was accepted. I read him the first chapter and he said, \u201cHey, this is good!\u201d All throughout my secret scribblings, he\u2019d say, \u201cI don\u2019t know what you\u2019re doing, but why don\u2019t you finish your thesis?\u201d Which thankfully ended up turning into papier-m\u00e2ch\u00e9 in a cardboard box.<\/p>\n The book is very talky. I do like that. I read everything aloud. I write it up by hand. Then I think, Oh God, that\u2019s terrible. I do massive scribbled amendments, read it aloud again\u2014and again. Then I tape-record it and I play it back to myself and I talk some more into the mirror. It\u2019s a sort of staging. And, rather than plotting, what I do is a kind of choreography. I\u2019ll think, Okay, there\u2019s a dining table, this person\u2019s sitting here, and that person\u2019s sitting there. I\u2019ll move myself around, changing chairs, doing dialogue. I\u2019ll be this person, then that person.<\/p>\n INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n As in, you\u2019ll move from one side of the table to the other?<\/p>\n TRAPIDO<\/p>\n Yeah. Or on a train, I\u2019ll determine which way they\u2019re facing. It\u2019s quite hard working out chronology and such things as, Is the season right for them to be eating this or that? Can I get this person on a train from one place to another place before closing time? All that can be a bit of a headache.<\/p>\n But the book is quite polished, because I\u2019d been working it more than for a decade, playing with it. Then one of my friends who was typesetting for Gollancz suggested I submit it. I thought, Oh yeah, Gollancz published all those left book-club books that Jake\u2019s shelves were full of. Maybe they\u2019d like mine. They wrote back within the week saying, \u201cWe love your novel. We\u2019d like to publish it. Tell us who you are.\u201d Doris Lessing had just conned a publisher by sending in a manuscript under another name. They thought maybe I was someone a bit experienced who was wanting to make an idiot of them. Well, it was a ten-years-being-polished first novel, so in a sense maybe I was quite \u201cexperienced.\u201d<\/p>\n My editor changed nothing except for my spelling of righteous<\/em>\u2014and she added three commas. I remember this very nice posh girl editor phoning me one day, saying, \u201cBarbara, shouldn\u2019t it be, \u2018Fuck off\u2019 comma \u2018you old cow?\u2019\u200a\u201d I remember the very first time somebody said fuck<\/em> in front of me \u2026<\/p>\n INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n How old were you?<\/p>\n TRAPIDO<\/p>\n I was about twenty-one. It was a Dutch poet who had come to stay.<\/p>\n INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n Does Katherine \u2026<\/p>\n TRAPIDO<\/p>\n She doesn\u2019t. And neither does Jane. They don\u2019t use bad language. But the boys do.<\/p>\n INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n Yes.<\/p>\n TRAPIDO<\/p>\n One woman who reviewed my book said, \u201cThis is a book in which the women smile and knit and the men have all the good lines.\u201d<\/p>\n INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n I don\u2019t think that\u2019s true.<\/p>\n TRAPIDO<\/p>\n I think, actually, it is, because the women are more confident, in a way. They don\u2019t need to be shouting and showing off. Though Katherine as the storyteller has some good lines.<\/p>\n INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n Who did you think of as an influence when you were writing?<\/p>\n TRAPIDO<\/p>\n I wasn\u2019t conscious of anybody, really. And I do get so tired of the way nearly every woman writer says, \u201cOh, Jane Austen was my influence.\u201d I think the one thing I maybe got from Jane Austen is the energy, the way the dialogue dances and sparkles. The first thing one of my friends who read it said was, \u201cYou don\u2019t waste any time on the scenery, do you?\u201d Maybe I got that from Jane Austen, the way that she\u2019ll just bounce into, \u201cMy dear Mr. Bennet \u2026\u201d I remembered, as a child, how I quite often just skipped bits that you thought of as \u201cdescription.\u201d With Jack,<\/em> I evidently just dispensed with the description.<\/p>\n