Rachel Cusk
I read Brother of the More Famous Jack as an undergraduate student at university. It introduced me to the possibilities of the contemporary female narrative voice. And that unmistakable voice has stayed clear in my ear over the two intervening decades, so that I can still repeat numerous passages or observations from the novel now, entirely from memory. There are many, many books I admire to which I could not pay anything like that sort of compliment.
The reason, I suppose, is that Brother of the More Famous Jack spoke to me. The story of an idiosyncratic young girl with literary tastes and a sense of humour, making her way through the world of men and finding that somehow, in her grasping of the nettle of romance, she has stung and stung herself into utter sorrow and submission, was of such personal interest to me that the novel in its entirety seemed a mere extension of this heroine’s interests, and my own. It was life itself as a literary enterprise: it was the personal as picaresque.
We first meet Katherine standing in the foothills of experience, fresh from the suburbs and possessing not much more than a talent for self-adornment and a university place to study philosophy: we leave her years later at its peak, happiness. I wondered whether Katherine herself gave her life this readable form. Or do novels merely mirror the shape of fate, its twists and turns obscuring but never vitiating the hope of arrival? In Katherine’s rocky progress I saw evidence of both. In her world of thwarted love and feeling I found readings and rereadings of the novelistic concept of determinism. And the title itself, with its resounding literary reference cheek-by-jowl with its consolation for the hapless, the hopeless, the perennially – in matters of the heart – mistaken: at nineteen or twenty, I felt that in Barbara Trapido I had found a new and extremely sympathetic friend.
But it is not unusual to see the art of writing and the art of living intertwined in an author’s first work. What is known as the ‘coming-of-age’ novel is often the tentative debut of both the writer and her heroine, who jointly attain different forms of competence in the sphere of human affairs before the reader’s eyes. Brother of the More Famous Jack is such a meditated example of this genre that it could almost be said to be a commentary on it: indeed, its clever interpolations of the subject of reading and writing, and of culture generally, make this ambition clear. From the first lines it is evident that we are to be given an account of inexperience that is the very opposite of tentative, that is as seasoned as its own rich repository of reference, and it is here that the novel makes its chief claim to originality. Few writers as talented as Barbara Trapido can wait very long before cracking open their store of material and hearing their authorial voice begin, however clumsily, to speak; and consequently, there are few modern tales of first love and its disillusions that are as thoroughly realised, as brilliantly lewd, and as hilariously satisfying to men and women of all ages as this one.
Among other things, the story of Katherine, only child of a prim Hendon widow, and her dealings with the Goldman family, an eight-strong, lavishly obscene, bohemian tribe captained by a kindly Jewish intellectual, is a portrait of a particular England: the middle-class England of unsung diversity and moral confusion, whose denizens are forever struggling to establish definitions of right and wrong in everything from art to sexual politics. This is an England where Marxist ideology meets suburban net-curtain values, where feminism meets housewifery, where a great deal of soul-searching goes on as new generations grapple with established social and familial roles and responsibilities. It is also an England whose comic literary possibilities have been inexplicably neglected over the years. This is part of what makes Brother of the More Famous Jack such a very funny novel. It is the humour of the newcomer, the outsider – as its author, transplanted from South Africa, once was – and she revives the English gift for social comedy with a newcomer’s relish.
But Brother of the More Famous Jack is first and foremost a book about destiny. It follows Katherine into womanhood, marriage, exile, motherhood, and indeed tragedy, and it implacably brings her back again to where she began. What seemed like a journey is in fact a slow process of recognition. It is one of the characteristics of youth – and particularly of early adulthood – that experience is formative; that events have a significance that feels in some sense fixed or preordained, as though in the first exposure of our fantasies and illusions to the world’s reality, a kind of hardening or permanence is conferred on them. This is perhaps our first – and sometimes only – experience of the notion of ‘plot’, of a course of events that are not random but meaningful, tutelary, even moral. Later, we learn that we gave these events their meaning, but at the time it feels the other way around. Brother of the More Famous Jack captures precisely the mixture of the carefree and the indelible that forms the atmosphere of this transaction. It is in our innocence, or in the loss of it, that we are formed in ways that can be reexamined but not undone. This novel teaches us to reread our lives, to look again, and to understand what escaped us the first time.