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ifteen years ago, a distinguished academic publisher brought out a densely argued, lavishly illustrated, wildly erudite monograph that seemed to completely reconceive the study of Johannes Vermeer. The author, an art historian named Benjamin Binstock, said that he had discerned the existence of an entirely new artist—Vermeer’s daughter Maria, the young woman Binstock had also identified as the likely model for Girl With a Pearl Earring—to whom he attributed seven of the 35 or so paintings then conventionally ascribed to Vermeer. To hear Binstock tell it, Maria’s paintings include one of the most popular: Girl With a Red Hat, at the National Gallery of Art, in Washington, D.C. He believes that painting and another at the National Gallery are self-portraits by Maria, and that she is also the artist behind two out of the three Vermeers at the Frick, in New York; two out of the five at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, also in New York; and one in the private Leiden Collection.  

I happened upon Binstock’s book, Vermeer’s Family Secrets, not long after it was published, in 2008; at the time, I was picking up pretty much anything about Vermeer (and writing about Vermeer myself). I found the author’s argument by turns absorbing, perplexing, and confounding, but also curiously plausible and certainly worth entertaining. I was struck by how Binstock’s account helped explain the smattering of “misfit paintings”—those strangely uncharacteristic efforts, especially toward the end of Vermeer’s career, whose attributions were regularly being contested (or defended) by experts. So I was eager to see how the wider community of scholars and curators was going to respond.

The establishment did not respond at all. There was not a single academic review—not then and not ever. I started broaching the subject with some of the experts I’d encountered during my own forays into Vermeer and was urged to give the book the widest possible berth. Its arguments were ridiculed (privately) as preposterous, and Binstock himself was dismissed (privately) with disdain. No one seemed willing to engage with Binstock’s actual contentions.

Which was strange, because I could imagine the arguments the Vermeer establishment might have made. If Vermeer didn’t paint all of the works attributed to him, then why is there no record of Vermeer ever having had any kind of assistant, despite the strict rule of the local painters’ guild (of which Vermeer was for a time the head) that assistants be registered? How could a girl as young as Maria—a teenager, if Binstock’s chronology is correct—have possibly created a painting as extraordinary as Girl With a Red Hat? Also: Why would Maria have suddenly stopped painting—and isn’t it too much of a coincidence that she stopped painting when her father died? And is Binstock’s chronology even correct? The dates he assigns to paintings are crucial to his narrative, but some differ significantly from the dates proposed by others, providing ample scope for debate. Critics could have raised these and other questions—but again, no one did.

I decided to seek Binstock out, and across a series of visits more than a decade ago began to see what may have been some of the reason for the lack of engagement. Then living in northern Manhattan, Binstock was no longer academically affiliated—he’d somehow managed to burn through not one but two highly competitive tenure-track positions—and seemed a bit lost. He had a Gibraltar-size chip on his shoulder, and he could be prickly and cantankerous. And yet he was so guileless—his modus operandi, he once joked, was to shoot himself in both feet and then shout “Nobody move!”—that his manner could be almost endearing.

At the time, I happened to be directing something called the New York Institute for the Humanities, at NYU, and I decided to give Binstock’s theory a whirl in a public symposium. In the months leading up to the day-long convocation, in 2013, I spent hours trying to coach the protagonist (“Be nice!” I’d insist. “Can’t you just be nice?”), and he succeeded in presenting a civil and indeed congenial demeanor. (You can access a video of Binstock’s presentation here.) Others who spoke that day included artists (Chuck Close, April Gornik, Vincent Desiderio) as well as generalist art historians and other scholars (Martha Hollander, James Elkins, Anthony Grafton). The idea was to subject Binstock’s arguments to a stress test, and I myself—eager to hear the strongest arguments against Binstock, as I still am—occasionally took the position of devil’s advocate. Those who spoke at the symposium had a wide range of responses but were unanimous in feeling that Binstock deserved a hearing. Not a single Vermeer specialist could be persuaded to participate.

The years passed. I moved on, and, to an extent, so did Binstock. He married a clarinetist named Meighan Stoops and the couple moved to Amsterdam, where they soon had two children. Binstock established a niche for himself as an independent scholar and editor working with wealthy private clients in a range of areas involving art connoisseurship and other fields in the humanities.

And then, just recently, things began to shake in the conventionally staid world of Vermeer. Restorers in Dresden made a drastic and controversial intervention upon one of their own Vermeer canvases, the beloved Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window. They literally peeled away the exquisitely rendered, light-bathed blank background behind the woman to reveal a painting of Cupid hanging on the wall, which was clearly Vermeer’s initial impulse, though it may also have been Vermeer himself who’d chosen to paint over it (don’t get Binstock started on this!). Meanwhile, senior curators and technical experts at the National Gallery built an entire show around its curators’ surprise revelation that one of the gallery’s Vermeers, Girl With a Flute, wasn’t by Vermeer at all—as Binstock had already argued—and must instead have been painted by some assistant, though no such assistant had been previously known (by them, anyway) to have existed. Finally, the Frick, closed for renovation, announced that it would allow its own three Vermeers to travel for the first time ever; curators at the august Rijksmuseum, in Amsterdam, took advantage of this to mount the most ambitious Vermeer retrospective of all time—28 works in total. Notwithstanding the National Gallery’s misgivings, the Rijksmuseum decided to include Girl With a Flute as an actual Vermeer. (“The doubt,” one of the curators assured a local newspaper, “will disappear somewhere over the ocean.”) The exhibition opened to ecstatic acclaim in February.

I decided it might be a good time to visit Amsterdam and pay another call to Binstock.

A man looks at Girl With a Pearl Earring during a press event at the Rijksmuseum. Photograph by Dana Lixenberg for The Atlantic.

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lthough Benjamin Binstock regularly gets cast (if he is even acknowledged) as some kind of wild-eyed outsider, he is not an outsider at all. He was born in Lexington, Massachusetts, in 1961, the third child in a high-powered though dysfunctional intellectual family. Alighting as an undergraduate at UC Berkeley, in 1979, he began by majoring in Dutch. (He had a Dutch girlfriend; his mother, after her divorce from his father, had married a Dutch diplomat.) A class taught by the charismatic Svetlana Alpers—“Types of Dutch and Flemish Painting”—made him switch to art history. Binstock displayed a savant’s capacity for noting and memorizing detailed visual subtleties across virtually the entirety of the 17th-century Dutch painterly canon, coupled with an extravagant inability to observe even the most rudimentary of social niceties. “And the two were of a piece,” Elizabeth Razzano, a friend from those days, told me. “It’s not that he’s insensitive. He’s oversensitive. And yet I can’t think back on him without a wide smile spreading across my face.”

In graduate school, Binstock began falling away from current trends in art history, which variously favored esoteric iconographic readings of individual paintings, or specialized technical analyses, or ever more narrowly focused investigations of topics pitched to ever more siloed academic readerships. He began instead to revel in what he saw as the core, originary task of art history: coming to terms with the entire arc of any given artist’s career, figuring out which works belonged and which works did not, and determining the order in which the confirmed works would have been created. He paid close attention to the paintings themselves—the subject matter, the models, the style, the maturity—and how they might be informed by what one knew about an artist’s life at any moment (and vice versa). For instance, if we know that the artist’s wife gave birth to more than a dozen children, and many of the artist’s paintings feature a pregnant woman, do any possibilities suggest themselves as to who the model might be? If two paintings seem to portray the same model, does the fact that the model is a girl in one and a young woman in another offer a hint as to when the paintings were created?

After research fellowships in Germany (focusing on Rembrandt) and graduate work at Columbia (where he studied under such eminent scholars as Richard Brilliant, Leo Steinberg, and David Freedberg), Binstock completed his doctorate and accepted a post at NYU, where, alas, he was expected to teach theory and criticism rather than his true passion, the painters and paintings themselves. So that didn’t work out. Meanwhile, his attention came to focus on Vermeer and on Vermeer’s immediate precursor in Delft (and Rembrandt’s greatest student), Carel Fabritius. Armed with a book contract from the British academic publisher Routledge, Binstock spent a year at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, New Jersey, and then moved to the American Academy in Berlin.

[From the April 1954 issue: Sacheverell Sitwell on the artistic genius of Holland]

At the time, only 12 paintings had been attributed to Fabritius, who died tragically young, but Binstock became convinced that he’d painted many more. In 2006, after months of visits to European museums and their storage vaults, he delivered an address to a conference in Berlin, effectively informing the top figures in Netherlandish art that they had been wrong about paintings they had been studying their entire lives. He claimed to have identified nearly 50 unacknowledged works as being by Fabritius. The talk did not go over well—one by one, participants rose to question his findings. “A career-ending performance” is how the late Walter Liedtke, then a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, summarized the event for me years later. Binstock returned to New York and taught briefly at Queens College (the second tenure-track fiasco) and as an adjunct at the Cooper Union. Then, in 2008, he published his book, with its claims about Vermeer’s daughter Maria.

In Vermeer’s Family Secrets, Binstock did not merely go against the grain of conventional wisdom. He saw himself as an apostate, a heretic rising up from the very heart of the profession. At least, that’s the message of the last of the nine extraordinarily detailed and useful appendices at the end of the book (on such topics as the Vermeer family tree, the provenance of Vermeer paintings, and the disputes over dating). In the last appendix, with typical cheekiness and disregard for scholarly convention, Binstock contrived to distill the entirety of his argument into “Ninety-Five Theses,” an obvious allusion to the tract Martin Luther was said to have nailed to the door of All Saints Church, in Wittenberg, effectively launching the Reformation.

Benjamin Binstock at his home in Amsterdam. Photograph by Dana Lixenberg for The Atlantic.

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eviving close contact with Binstock after almost a decade, I found him more sedate; domestic life obviously agreed with him. Of course, I sometimes still had to weather the churning roil of his stream of consciousness. I won’t try to replicate his frenetic, perseverating mode of expression here. But when Binstock grows focused, and whenever he writes, he sets out his arguments with precision.

During the five days of my visit to Amsterdam, on the eve of the Vermeer show, we visited the Rijksmuseum together and stood spellbound in front of The Milkmaid and The Little Street. We went down to the Mauritshuis, in The Hague, to visit Girl With a Pearl Earring and, opposite her, View of Delft, which we argued about—not the attribution but the image’s deeper meanings. I thought the vantage conspicuously alluded to the devastation caused by the explosion of the armory a few years before the painting’s creation, which had killed, among many others, Carel Fabritius; Binstock disagreed. Off to the side was Fabritius’s exquisite Goldfinch (1654), on which I could still make out, once Binstock drew my eye to them, tiny pockmarks left by spray from the explosion. We went to Delft, where Binstock showed me the house (now a Delftware souvenir shop) where Vermeer had grown up; and then the site of his mother-in-law’s house, no longer there, into which Vermeer had moved when he married.

Across these various perambulations, Binstock unfurled for me the story of how, to his astonishment, he came to realize that although most catalogs and monographs provided general date ranges for Vermeer’s individual works (say, “1660–62”) and overall thematic summations, many of the date ranges varied and nobody had yet attempted a painting-by-painting analysis that put chronology and the family’s biography in the foreground. Such a timeline, with its emphasis on the relations between paintings and the artist’s development over the years, could prove immensely clarifying: Nailing down the sequence would be revelatory in itself and at the same time provoke questions. Binstock began trying to work out this timeline, using a long wall in his apartment on which he spread accurately scaled reproductions of all the paintings, shuffling and reshuffling. (The painting dates provided below are based on Binstock’s array; most of them track mainstream opinion in a general way but depart from it with respect to a number of specific paintings, in particular the ones he assigns to Maria.)

As Binstock worked on his wall, several things became apparent to him.  For starters, plenty of information exists regarding Vermeer’s life, despite the endlessly repeated lament about a lack of just that. Ever since the Yale professor John Michael Montias published the results of his heroic labors—sifting through the Delft municipal archives and church registries and auction records for his highly regarded book Vermeer and His Milieu: A Web of Social History (1989)—we have had a great deal of factual data. Scholars have mined the book for their studies of individual paintings. Binstock, by contrast, employed the information as one form of evidence for his chronological reconstruction of Vermeer’s life.

Moreover, using the evidence in the paintings themselves—for instance, the apparent reappearance of certain individuals—combined with what can be known or surmised about Vermeer’s life and household, Binstock attempted to identify the various models. The idea that Vermeer may have used family and household members in his paintings is not that controversial, but Binstock assigned specific individuals to specific works. In his telling, some individuals appear in multiple paintings, and their gradual aging can be used as a clue to establish—or revise—the proper chronological sequencing of Vermeer’s work.  

And finally, try as Binstock might to piece together a sequence, things got somewhat bollixed, especially toward the end of Vermeer’s life. If the chronology was right, then several paintings didn’t seem to fit. For various reasons, such as style and quality, they seemed inconsistent with other Vermeer paintings that had been made, according to Binstock’s reckoning, at about the same time. Could they have come from someone else’s hand?

Johannes Vermeer was born in 1632, the son of a tavern keeper and part-time art dealer. At age 21, he married Catharina Bolnes, a neighbor and the daughter of a well-to-do matron named Maria Thins. In its general outline, especially toward the start, the course of Vermeer’s life and work as laid out by Binstock dovetails with the course laid out by others. But much of the detail Binstock provides, connecting family members to Vermeer’s paintings, is novel. His scenarios amount to hypotheses, buttressed by evidence and argument, but still hypotheses. That said, in his book, he has a disconcerting way of slipping from the conditional (Vermeer could have been …) into the self-evident indicative (Since we now know that Vermeer was …), presenting possibilities as settled facts.

One of Binstock’s key early contentions is that, in most of his paintings across the first decade of his career, Vermeer used his wife, Catharina, as his model. As Binstock sees it, she appeared initially in biblical or mythological guises—as Martha in Christ in the House of Martha and Mary (1653) and as Diana in Diana and Her Companions (1655). In both cases, the woman in the painting is shown to be pregnant. Soon, however, the artist began shifting from such portentous themes to genre subjects celebrating everyday life. These years saw the birth of Johannes and Catharina’s daughter Maria, in 1654, the first of what would eventually be 11 surviving children. Catharina, Binstock believes, is shown pregnant again in 1657, likely with another daughter, Elisabeth, in the exquisite Girl Reading a Letter, with its evocative bowl of ripe fruit: the earliest of Vermeer’s signature portrayals of a woman standing alone, seemingly unaware that she is being gazed upon. Binstock notes that, throughout this period, Vermeer was an achingly slow and exacting painter, his canvases taking eight or nine months to complete so that, in a sense, the husband and wife were involved in a parallel and overlapping roundelay of conception and creation.

In 1664, Vermeer began to work outdoors, first to paint his enchanting The Little Street, which Binstock believes must show the mother-in-law’s house, where Vermeer and his family lived. (He is not entirely alone in this conjecture.) Binstock points out how the differently gridded windows on the various floors align perfectly with the side windows that feature so prominently in Vermeer’s various interiors—so much so that he can tell you which painting was painted in which room. If this is indeed Vermeer’s house, then the figures in The Little Street, Binstock argues, likely include Catharina, pregnant again, sewing at the front door; the housemaid Tanneke Everpoel in the narrow side alley; and 10-year-old Maria crouched at play on the sidewalk. After The Little Street, Vermeer set off for the town’s outskirts to create what many regard as his single greatest painting, View of Delft (1665), in which, incidentally, one can make out a woman (Binstock says it’s Catharina) carrying a baby, having just disembarked from a boat.

Once Vermeer began working again in his studio, in 1666, a new figure appears in the paintings: a model Binstock identifies as Maria, now 13. In Binstock’s reconstruction, Maria took over the main role as model beginning in Woman With a Pearl Necklace and, the next year, The Art of Painting. Continuing the reconstruction: In 1670, Vermeer immortalized Maria, who would have just reached 17, as the blue-turbaned subject of Girl With a Pearl Earring. (The suggested dates of the paintings are entwined with the age of the supposed model.) Binstock is not the first to have identified the girl as the painter’s daughter—and any father of a daughter can tell you that her expression of fondness tinged with exasperation is a familiar one. Marcel Proust’s friend Jean-Louis Vaudoyer made the same connection between daughter and portrait. Writing at the time of the famous 1921 Paris Vermeer show, he trained his eye first on the young woman who posed for The Art of Painting, then at the girl wearing the pearl earring: “Here is the model with lowered eyes, probably the painter’s daughter, a child who is without any doubt the same whose divine head in the blue turban is included to torment our hearts in the exhibition at the Jeu de Paume.” An outing to that show, at Vaudoyer’s urging, was one of the largely bedridden Proust’s last excursions before his death the following year.

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p to this point, the main difference between Binstock’s narrative and that of other scholars involves the way he pinpoints specific models and the conclusions he draws about specific dates. But as Vermeer enters the 1670s, Binstock’s account begins to diverge more sharply from that of the scholarly mainstream.

The most heterodox element of Binstock’s thinking has to do with Maria. In these years—starting in the late 1660s—she had been serving not only as her father’s model, Binstock argues, but also as his assistant, grinding his paints and the like. If this is so, she would have had ample opportunity to study his methods at close quarters. In time, Binstock believes, Maria began to produce paintings of her own, starting with two works on wood panels (the only two such works in the entire Vermeer canon), both self-portraits, as was often the case with beginning painters. (What other model is so easily available?) The first of the paintings Binstock attributes to her is the National Gallery’s decidedly awkward Girl With a Flute (1672) and the second, produced that same year, is the accomplished and ravishing Girl With a Red Hat. (He gives a later date for both of these paintings than other accounts do, in part because of the age of the person he believes to be the model.)

Was Vermeer known to have had an assistant? Were the daughters of other artists known to have ever taken up the brush? To the first question: No documentation says so, but last year, when the National Gallery of Art decided to reclassify Girl With a Flute as not from Vermeer’s hand, it pointed to an apprentice or student as having been the painter. I saw the gallery’s exhibition and afterward spoke with Betsy Wieseman, the head of the museum’s department of Northern European painting. She said, “For the first time, we have concrete evidence, against all previous thinking, that suggests to us that Vermeer had an apprentice, that he had a workshop with at least one such student; and that, in turn, opens all sorts of avenues for further study.” Of course, the museum’s finding did not go against all previous thinking—Binstock had made the case years earlier. He had also advanced an explanation for why no documentation from the painters’ guild, which required members to register apprentices and students, had ever turned up: There was an exception to this rule. As he wrote in his book, “A painter’s own children were never registered.”

[From the May 2022 issue: Susan Tallman on the Melville of American painting]

To the second question: After the National Gallery made its announcement, an article in The Guardian included a comment from Eric Jan Sluijter, an art-history professor emeritus at the University of Amsterdam. Sluijter spoke to various theories—including Binstock’s, though his name was not mentioned by the professor or the newspaper—about who the painter of Girl With a Flute might be, including that she was the painter’s daughter. “It’s not that eccentric,” Sluijter said of the idea. “It is a possibility. We know of other daughters working in their father’s studio in the seventeenth century. Often they married and then stopped painting, so they didn’t become independent artists.” As for Maria’s youthful age: Fresh and dynamic work by young artists is hardly unknown in the history of art, especially in the case of those reared in the family of other artists—the Italian Renaissance, for instance, provides many examples.

From left: Girl With a Flute (Johannes Vermeer / National Gallery of Art); Girl With a Red Hat (Johannes Vermeer / National Gallery of Art); Girl With a Pearl Earring (Johannes Vermeer / Mauritshuis, The Hague).

Girl With a Flute and Girl With a Red Hat constitute the first of three principal tentpoles, as it were, in Binstock’s argument for assigning the late misfit paintings to Maria Vermeer. The two paintings are clearly—Binstock insists—by the same artist. The model is the same in both, as are the chairs, and both have tapestry-like backdrops; both are on wood panels; in both, the figures occupy the same relative scale. And the artist, whoever it was, seems to have had trouble painting hands—they are awkwardly pudgy in one and occluded in the other.

Furthermore, he argues, Girl With a Red Hat in particular affords a conspicuous mirror image of the model in Girl With a Pearl Earring. Flip the image, and Red Hat girl is remarkably similar to Pearl Earring girl.

Left: Girl With a Red Hat flipped (Johannes Vermeer / National Gallery of Art). Right: Girl With a Pearl Earring (Johannes Vermeer / Mauritshuis, The Hague).

Binstock’s explanation is that Maria was painting a self-portrait—looking at herself in a mirror, trying to replicate and in a sense take ownership of the very pose she herself had had to maintain for all those hours for the earlier painting of her father’s. And if Red Hat seems slightly more static, there may be a reason for that. At the Institute for the Humanities conference, years ago, Gerri Davis, a prolific portraitist and self-portraitist, pointed out a big difference between the two genres: The faces in portraits tend to be more animated, the artist having been engaged across time in a lively interaction with the subject, whereas in self-portraits, the face muscles tend to slacken and the gaze becomes more silently intent—on itself—as is the case here.

Binstock surmises that Maria followed up Red Hat with Study of a Young Woman (1672). This painting, he believes, depicts a new sitter in the Vermeer household, whom he identifies, in part on the basis of age, as Maria’s sister and Vermeer’s second daughter, Elisabeth.

The high forehead and the bulging eyes would recur in several paintings by both Vermeers—as Binstock would put it—but in this one, the blocky, relatively rudimentary treatment of the enveloping shawl (and where exactly is the shoulder?) calls to mind similar treatments in both Flute and Red Hat. And once again there’s the inability to deal with hands. Years ago, standing beside me before this painting at the Met, the curator Walter Leidtke had zeroed in on the truncated stump as definitive proof of Vermeer’s genius, the inspired way the master had tucked the hand itself behind the frame, adding to the image’s three-dimensionality. I didn’t quite buy it.

The second tentpole of Binstock’s argument involves the three paintings at the Frick, and specifically a comparison between the two that are almost always displayed in close proximity, Officer and Laughing Girl (1658) and Girl Interrupted at Her Music (1673).

Left: Officer and Laughing Girl (Johannes Vermeer / The Frick). Right: Girl Interrupted at Her Music (Johannes Vermeer / The Frick).

Because, seriously, Binstock asks, how could these two paintings be by the same artist? The first shows a master at the peak of his powers—the even tidal flow of light across the room; the intricate and contrasting treatment of the clothing fabrics, chair backing, and wall hanging; the subtle play of expressions across both faces; the assured placement of figures in space. The second, which mainstream dating puts closer to the first, is more tentative in every respect, and steeped in a countervailing gloom. Binstock dates it later and attributes it to Maria, noting that across history, the initial virtuosity of many young artists becomes momentarily constrained as they begin to take on the full weight of the achievements of previous masters and start bending their work accordingly. In this instance, the master is her father, and the result is a sort of pastiche, a mash-up of some of his earlier paintings—The Glass of Wine (1658), now in Berlin, and The Girl With the Wine Glass (1659), now in the Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum, in Braunschweig—that his daughter would have had occasion to study at the nearby home of Vermeer’s principal patron. (Not that the painting isn’t arresting all the same.)

Similarly, the third Frick painting, Mistress and Maid (1673), which Binstock reassigns to Maria, is a pastiche that plays off A Lady Writing (1669), in Washington; The Love Letter (1671), in Amsterdam; and Lady Writing a Letter With Her Maid (1673), in Dublin. And again there is the flattened gloom of a backdrop curtain, and the lobster-claw hands. Furthermore, recent X-rays reveal that the deep-brown background curtain covers an earlier flat backdrop, the same sort of tapestry found in Girl With a Flute and Girl With a Red Hat.

The third tentpole in Binstock’s argument involves a final Vermeer masterpiece, The Lacemaker (1674), which Binstock considers alongside another canvas, Young Woman Seated at a Virginal (also 1674). Two decades ago, a technical investigation of the thread weave of Virginal’s canvas showed that it had been cut from the same bolt of canvas as The Lacemaker, leading to the painting’s wide acceptance as a Vermeer. The authors of an analysis in Burlington magazine after a 2004 Sotheby’s sale summed up the matter: “The evidence thus suggests that, if the artist who painted Young Woman Seated at a Virginal was not Vermeer, it can only have been someone who was not only intimately acquainted with his materials and practice, but also with his individual style. No such painter is known to us, and the facts therefore provide compelling arguments for accepting the painting as a work by Vermeer.”

Left: The Lacemaker (Johannes Vermeer / Louvre Museum). Right: Young Woman Seated at a Virginal (Johannes Vermeer / Leiden Collection).

Of course, one of the facts—about a possible apprentice—has changed significantly since 2004; the case for an apprentice has now won support from the National Gallery. Binstock regards Virginal, too, as one of Maria’s paintings. There are suggestive features: the clunky shawl, the awkward hands (“those pig trotters,” as one critic characterized them). Further, Binstock asks: Is it really plausible that these two paintings (though clearly of the same model, again Elisabeth), so markedly different in quality, could have been rendered by the same painter, one after the other, as they would have had to have been given the proximate positions of their underlying canvases on the same bolt?

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he Lacemaker was Vermeer’s last painting, as Binstock sees it; and, in his telling, Young Woman Seated at a Virginal was Maria’s last painting. If it is not her best, in Binstock’s view—a step below Girl With a Red Hat—it is still fresh and vivid.  

I asked Binstock why Maria, if the artist was Maria, would have suddenly stopped painting. Perhaps she didn’t, Binstock said—maybe other paintings will turn up. But Maria had married in 1674 and Vermeer had died in 1675, and “she and the family would have had ample reason to keep her authorship secret and to destroy any supporting documentation.” How so? “Well, that has to do with the circumstances of Vermeer’s own death,” Binstock said.

It’s not as though Vermeer was an old man, he explained, despite the way that some historians try to chalk up the decline apparent in his later production—the various misfit paintings—as evidence of his onrushing senescence. He was only 43, and—witness the The Lacemaker—still capable of work that was among his best. Senescence-school historians try to put The Lacemaker much earlier in his career—the Rijksmuseum catalog places it as early as 1666—but the subject seems to be his grown daughter Elisabeth, or at any rate the same model as in so many of the other later problem paintings. (This is the kind of dating issue—which also involves Girl With a Red Hat, Girl With a Flute, and Study of a Young Woman—that might lead to fruitful debate if Vermeer experts were to take Binstock’s challenge seriously.)

“Vermeer had been suffering blow after blow during those last years,” Binstock told me. The basic facts are not in dispute. In 1674, his main patron died and Maria married and left the household. More to the point, two years earlier, Louis XIV had invaded the Netherlands, cutting a terrible swath across the south of the country, and in defensive response the Dutch had breached their dikes—which, incidentally, is why you come upon so many paintings of the pharaoh’s armies being swallowed up by the Red Sea in subsequent Netherlandish painting. The tactic proved successful, but severely damaged the economy.

Vermeer’s side business as an art dealer dried up, and there he was with all those children and no income. He became frantic. At one point we know he settled a debt with the baker by giving him a large painting (which Binstock believes was the Met’s Young Woman With a Water Pitcher), but another debt was coming due, and as Catharina subsequently reported (Montias, the Yale professor, found her statement in an inquest document), “he had lapsed into such decay and decadence, which he had so taken to heart that, as if he had fallen into a frenzy, in a day or day and a half he went from being healthy to being dead,” leaving the surviving family in desperate circumstances.

To follow Binstock’s reconstruction: One can imagine Maria and her mother huddling together in the weeks after Vermeer’s death and gazing over at her canvases propped against the wall, thinking, Huh. The family settled their remaining debt with the baker and secured future supplies by passing along two more paintings (which in Binstock’s view happened to be two of Maria’s)—the Frick’s Mistress and Maid and the Met’s Young Woman With a Lute. Others likely found their way into circulation in similar fashion. “Maria and the family,” Binstock told me, “would have had every reason to keep the matter secret, and that circumstance may have played into Maria’s own decision to stop further painting, or calling attention to herself, if that is indeed what she did.”

“The trouble with Binstock,” David Freedberg, his old doctoral supervisor, told me, “is that he just knows so much, has such prodigious visual and cultural-historical information at his continuous command, that he can always produce convincing material to support his side of the case, however unusual.” After a pause, he went on, “Still, it’s a real shame that the field has not found some way to incorporate his thinking.” Shame, as in too bad for him? “Oh no,” Freedberg clarified, “too bad for the field.”

On that day 10 years ago when we’d tarried before the Young Woman with the disappearing hand at the Met, Walter Liedtke, in response to prodding on my part about Binstock, had given way to exasperation. A person can build up the most magnificent edifice and just be wrong, he explained. “You can come up with scenarios that are internally consistent, even cogent, but that doesn’t make them historically accurate. When you’re looking for something, as in a Rorschach, you will find it.” Just as if you aren’t, I suggested, you won’t—that kind of thinking cuts both ways. “No,” Leidtke countered. “Two things are required: documentation and consensus, and Binstock has neither.”

Documentation and consensus. The issue with the first is what gets to count as “documentation”—or as evidence more generally—given the current mindset of this academic field. I was reminded of the presentation by James Elkins, at the 2013 symposium, in which he ticked off the many avenues Binstock had pursued: conservation studies, provenance tracing, legal records, church records, art-market records. Elkins lamented that most of those sources of insight are “peripheral to the current concerns of the discipline.” (Elkins devoted a chapter to Binstock and to this and other questions in his 2017 collection, What Is Interesting Writing in Art History?) Whether or not one goes along with Binstock’s interpretation, any reader of Binstock’s book cannot help but be struck by the onslaught of factual information, over and beyond the internal evidence of the paintings themselves. There is, of course, no bill of sale bearing the name Maria Vermeer, but there is enough documentation to underpin considerable circumstantial speculation about Vermeer’s life and family.

As for consensus, the difficulty with that concept is its self-reinforcing circularity. How can one be expected to affect the consensus if one is not already of it, or is steadfastly ignored by the gatekeeping establishment? And the stakes are very high, not just in terms of money. As Eric Jan Sluijter told The Guardian: “There is so much invested in these paintings, literally, but also in the reputations of art historians or museums.”

On my last day in Amsterdam, I went to visit Pieter Roelofs, the dapper young head of painting and sculpture at the Rijksmuseum and one of two co-organizers of the Vermeer show (though he is not a Vermeer specialist himself). I found him somewhat exhausted (how would he not be?) but excited at the prospect of the coming weeks. “Every generation deserves an exhibition of Vermeer,” he said. “The last exhibition on Vermeer was Washington in 1995–96, meaning that anyone under 40 has never had the opportunity to see a monographic show of Vermeer.” When I brought up some of the recent controversies, such as the Dresden restoration and the attributional disagreement with the National Gallery over Girl With a Flute, he said he was looking forward to a symposium in Amsterdam at the end of March, when the greatest Vermeer scholars in the world will be able to thrash such matters out in the presence of the paintings themselves. I raised the question of Binstock, with whom he was familiar, and the conversation came around, as ever, to the lack of documentation; he said that Vermeer scholars would “dream” to discover a document proving that a member of Vermeer’s family was involved in his workshop. He didn’t seem to realize that Binstock had actually been living right there in Amsterdam for the past four years. Would Binstock be part of the symposium? “He will be. I mean, he will attend.” In what capacity? “Not as a speaker, but he will attend.”

The Rijksmuseum displaying a banner advertising the Vermeer exhibition, 2023. Photograph by Dana Lixenberg for The Atlantic.

Emerging from the building into a brisk Dutch winter afternoon to meet up with Binstock, I took note of the banners on two sides of the museum’s exterior, fluttering in the breeze and grandly proclaiming the coming extravaganza. The banners bore crisp, enlarged details from three of the featured paintings: the plush yellow jacket from Mistress and Maid, the eternally emptying jug from The Milkmaid, and the exquisite blue shoulder wrap from Girl With a Red Hat. When I mentioned the coming symposium to Binstock, he told me that he knew nothing about it. No one had yet reached out to him (and no one has reached out since). He himself spoke recently about his theories to a standing-room-only audience at the prestigious Koninklijke Industrieele Groote Club, in Amsterdam; Roelofs was invited but did not attend.

One needs to be careful about a theory like Binstock’s. For obvious reasons, it has a certain emotional appeal; one can almost see the movie. We know that a central element, long dismissed—that Vermeer had an assistant—has now won support from at least a corner of the establishment. Whatever else establishment scholars might determine—or definitively disprove—will remain conjecture until they take up the matter. Even then, we may never know the absolute truth one way or the other—and for myself, I can live in a perhaps necessary state of uncertainty. (“How can you say that?” Binstock bristled when I suggested as much. “What could possibly be more important?”)

Binstock may of course be completely wrong in his ideas. But if he is right, then two of the three paintings on the museum’s exterior banners are by Maria Vermeer. And if he is right, the Rijksmuseum exhibition, no matter what else it may be, constitutes the greatest Maria Vermeer show ever, with six of her presumed canvases gathered in one place for the first time since 1675.

This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.

I held off on asking a new question of the week last Wednesday so I could share more of your reflections on cars. Below are the remainder of your thoughtful replies.

Eden fondly recalls a moment of peak freedom in a mechanically questionable vehicle:

Like most of my friends in 1995, I got my driver's license on my 16th birthday. My stepdad had hordes of busted-up cars on the front lawn, and he gifted me a royal-blue 1976 Volkswagen Scirocco that barely ran. Even though the car was a total POS, the excitement and joy I felt at driving that car by myself will always be one of the best feelings I have experienced in my life.

That first night, I picked up my friend Cody from his shift at the North Seattle Arby’s. He didn’t have to take the bus home that night for once. I put a battery-powered boom box in the back seat (there was no radio in the car, of course) and played a Led Zeppelin tape at full blast, reveling in my newfound freedom. Even now, it’s hard to imagine a time when I have felt freer than at that moment.  

The car would die if it idled for even a second. I could barely slow down to a full stop before I had to rev the engine. The driver and passenger seats weren’t even bolted down! If I gunned it at the bottom of a big hill, we would literally flip into the back seat, laughing until tears fell from our eyes. I remember the smell so vividly. Sometimes, I’ll get a whiff that reminds me of it, and I am transported back to flying down the street, my car packed with friends. My soul stirs with the sound of laughter and the crackling of the fuzzy boom box. I remember how many times we would go for drives just to drive.  

I had to learn a great deal about automobiles to make sure the car kept running and didn’t kill us. The number of times I locked my keys in there, or left the lights on until the battery died, is laughable. But I was never once embarrassed by the state of that car. As far as I was concerned, I was the envy of all my friends, rich as a sultan, and as free as a bird.

I’ll be nostalgic about it until I die.  

Amelia found that getting her driver’s license wasn’t all she imagined it would be:

I’m 16 and I’ve wanted to drive for as long as I could remember. I’ve been driving on my own for about three months. Even before I started driving myself, I considered the act of owning and driving a car emblematic of the independence you receive as an adult. Being able to drive yourself to school, to sports practice, to anywhere you wanted to go seemed too good to be true. I held these aspirations close, and no one rebuked me, thus my life was shaped by this modern, American version of independence. I saw teens living their best lives on TV and in movies, and they all had one thing in common: cars.

I live in a sprawling and rather car-dependent suburban area, so I can never walk anywhere. I can vividly remember my summers before my 15th year complaining or wandering around the house aimlessly because I didn’t have a job yet, and my parents and brother were gone for the day. None of my friends reached out, yet I still watched their lives continue on through a screen while faking my own in the same way. I remember one instance where, in a burst of confidence, I tried to ride my bike three miles to a local ice-cream shop and almost got run over by a car.

Now I can drive myself. I’m independent; I get to choose what music to play! I finally got what I wanted. But I still go everywhere mostly alone. Don’t get me wrong; I consider myself an extrovert. I see my friends as often as I can in and outside of school, but the thing is, nothing changed. We don’t carpool, because it’s too out of the way and everyone else drives alone anyways. Driving my own car wasn’t the magical switch I’d been looking for after all. Maybe it wasn’t as much me that was the problem, but the infrastructure that surrounded me.

J. is a driving enthusiast:

Goddamn I love cars! I realize they are polluting and occasionally murderous, but the convenience and freedom can’t be denied. Plus driving is just so fun! My commute is short, and at work, I get to drive a fire engine. Code 3 with lights and sirens! Running red lights! Wrong way down one-way streets to attempt to help society! It’s pretty great.

Cars have been a key part of my identity for more than three decades: My first car was a hand-me-down 1981 Ford Escort. Since that first car, I’ve owned the quirky (1987 Nissan Pulsar), the blue-collar (1977 Chevy pickup), the classic (1965 Chevy Bel Air), the sporty (1991 Nissan 300ZX), the practical (2006 Toyota Tacoma), the baby-mover (2008 Lexus RX350), and now, the grown-up (and first new) family car, a Mazda CX-5—with turbo! Some had custom wheels or paint. Almost all had custom sound systems.

My cars were my peacock tail, my rack of antlers. They enabled my life, which has been a pretty good one. I asked my wife to marry me in our car, and she accepted.

They also enabled some unsavory behavior: I used to pick up prostitutes, after a night out drinking, for years. Until the last time—when the prostitute turned out to be an undercover cop. I’ve been (at times) incredibly reckless, and (very often) incredibly lucky, behind the wheel. By the grace of God I never hurt anyone … and now I have a career where I drive fast (but not so recklessly) to help people in need.

Life is weird. And cars are awesome!

Maxx makes a case for glory without gasoline:

Last September, I gave my car to my college-town-bound little brother. I now live car-free in Minneapolis. I’m 25 and did not get my license until I was 19. I am now a passionate cyclist, scrappy public-transit enthusiast, and bold pedestrian. And I love it.

When I bike to work, I’ve shown up positive and awake, coffee optional. Figuring out how to get somewhere new is an opportunity to plan a pleasurable route. In summer, my friends and I take to our bicycles and hop from concert to park to bar to apartment. Cutting gas, insurance, and car payments out of our budgets, in whole or in part, gives us disposable income we can still afford to spend locally—and foolishly. Rather than letting it restrict us, there’s incredible freedom. You hardly worry about where to park, and, if folks behave responsibly enough, no one has to be shunted to the role of designated driver.

The day-to-day is a joy. My diet has to be up to the challenge of biking 80 miles a week in the summer, and 30 a week in the winter. And the conditioning and fresh-air perspective have expanded my imagination when it comes to travel and leisure; my brother and I are planning to bike across Minnesota, the long way, once he graduates. It would be a rather constrained road trip, but feels like a downright adventure on a bicycle.

In Minnesota, folks lampoon us car skeptics with the complaint that it’s winter for (an exaggerated proportion) of the year. I don’t want to be glib, but when I’m riding a fat-tire bike in fresh snow, I’m usually matching the speed of any responsible driver on city streets. Being free of the anxieties, expenses, and constant gripes of driving and car ownership is a seriously underrated luxury.

I aspire to have a family and realize that someday my weekends won’t revolve around the question of what pleasure we can find on quiet wheels. But I hope I can stay car-lite—walking to the grocery store, instilling active living and community in my children. We live in a world of people, places, and things. It can be hard to see them—or appreciate them—in a moving metal box.

A.l. opines on not having a car:

My family lives in a fairly dense suburban environment that was first developed about 100 years ago as a “streetcar neighborhood.” I live pretty close to my office and I ride my bike year-round. I also live nearby a bus line that runs directly to my office with no transfers.

About once a week, not having a car is a big hassle. Getting to work when it’s pouring rain, trying to get to a doctor appointment in a different part of town, stopping off for a work event in a different part of town on the way home from work, leaving for a business trip from home to the airport, etc. It’s a real pain.

Going to work, I have no issue using public transportation and no issue riding my bike, but both of them can be inflexible from a schedule standpoint in that both incur additional non-value-add time, roughly an hour each day—and that’s for someone who pays through the nose to live in a part of town where most of what I need is close by.

I’m struck by the strong downward pressure on my quality of life that comes from not having access to a car, and I empathize with people who don’t have the money to buy a car if they need one to manage their routine. I also feel a profound sense of guilt burning fossil fuels. I’ll never buy another gas-powered car. So I’m proud of being car-free, but somewhat conflicted.

Kate has appreciated many places she never could have gone but for trucks:

For me, a vehicle is a ticket to adventure. When I was 7 (1967), my parents hooked up a rented U-Haul trailer to the back of a six-cylinder Chevy truck, threw three kids in the back, and drove us from Reno, Nevada, to the Arctic Circle in Alaska. We navigated some 6,000-plus miles of highway, dirt roads, permafrost, sinkholes, mosquitoes, and wildlife. We camped out in national parks, roadside rests, KOAs, and gravel pits. In subsequent years we toured Canada, drove to Mexico City, and made it to most of the national parks. That upbringing fueled a love of the outdoors and the vehicles that could get me there.

In my younger years, I loved my 4x4s. They enable you to get stuck in more remote places!!! Grandkids and gas prices changed my preferences over the years. We still own a Chevy truck. However, my current adventure vehicle is a Subaru Outback. It can navigate dirt roads, is great in the snow, averages 25 mpg, and has plenty of room to sleep in the back. Can’t wait for the hybrid version.

Vasav has fallen out of love with cars over the years:

I went to the University of Michigan to become a mechanical engineer because I loved cars. My parents were immigrants from India, and every 4th of July we’d go on a road trip and they’d say how wonderful superhighways were and how they made America so great. We loved trains too. We never saw a conflict. You could love trains and cars. Most of our family vacations were road trips. There were a lot of them. And cars were incredibly cool.

In Ann Arbor, I didn’t need a car for most of my daily needs. A bike worked better. Then I joined the Air Force and had a two-year stint in Japan, where I had a similar relationship with cars. I now live in an inner-ring suburb of an overpriced metro. And I don’t hate cars. I appreciate them. I can’t imagine a lot of my outdoor adventures without them. But I much prefer walking, riding a bus or train, or even biking for most of my regular needs. What happened? I got old.

I now view cars as a tool, not the toy they were. I now view working on my car as a chore, not fun. And I had enough acquaintances die in accidents that I realized the dangers. I still think cars are incredible machines—a number of ingenious systems that all work together. I still love Detroit. But there are a lot of neat machines out there, and most are less dangerous. Nevertheless, it’s hard to imagine taking a bus to go backpacking or trail biking, so there’s a happy medium.

Chris lists what he sees as the ills of car culture:

Car culture has reconfigured the landscape to accommodate drivers, as opposed to pedestrians. It has hollowed out small towns and many large cities by sucking commerce from downtown to the banal, ugly world of strip malls, vast parking lots, and endless suburban sprawl. It has atomized society by isolating commuters who would once have enjoyed random, face-to-face interactions on foot or public transport. It has poisoned the atmosphere and exacerbated global warming. Once a convenience, cars are now an expensive necessity. Car culture itself is a textbook example of path dependence—an optional mode of behavior that grew so dominant, it’s the only available mode.

Jack doesn’t have a car for a different reason:

Oakland, California, has bent over backwards to accommodate the livelihoods of criminals. In the hectic adjustment, I’ve had two cars stolen from my driveway after an earlier heist of four tires at a public-transit parking lot. Now I am a devoted Lyft customer. It’s a hot trend here.

Brad believes his early experiences with cars were character-building:

At 15, I got my first job, aiming for enough money to buy a car by my 16th birthday. I wanted to be as independent as possible from my family. Within a few weeks of my birthday, I paid $1,300 for an old Mazda and learned how to keep the car insured and fueled. Over the next five years, I drove Frankie (so named because his blue paint matched Sinatra’s famous eyes) more than 80,000 miles, shuttling myself and friends to jobs and activities, going on school trips, and traversing the 500 miles between college and home. That first car taught me a lot about financial responsibility and how to literally navigate my own life.  

Even back in 2004, when I started college, I found these qualities lacking in many of my peers. The rare individuals who had purchased and maintained their own cars before college generally seemed more likely to embrace and handle their new independence.

My second car, a used Audi A6, taught me resilience and the value of due diligence. Shortly before I started law school, I purchased Rita (so named because she was beautiful, troubled, and destined for tragedy, like the character on Dexter). On the drive home from the dealership, she broke down, beginning a parade of maladies that drained my savings in six months, completely overlapping with the first year of law school. I’d bought a lemon at a stunningly inopportune time in my life. It was a painful lesson, but better learned at 24 than 54. I offloaded Rita quickly, and have owned practical, reliable cars since. After all of this, I really don’t enjoy driving. I yearn for the days when public transportation will obviate the need for me to own a car, which will be better for me and for the planet.

If you’re going somewhere with Joanne, let her drive:

I grew up on a farm. At 5, I could steer a tractor up and down the rows of baled hay so my dad and a hired man could throw them on the wagon. I could drive our truck at 10, and if my parents were away, my twin brother and I would whip into town for a Dairy Queen. Fast-forward to high school, where we had an excellent driver’s ed instructor. The lessons were during our Ontario winters, and often involved practice pulling out of skids on empty but ice-covered parking lots. A useful skill! I am a senior now and back in the country, dealing with long country driveways, ice, snow, freezing rain, and whiteout conditions. They don’t faze me, or at least not yet, because of all that early driving experience.

And if you’re trying to improve our transportation infrastructure, consider this advice from K.S.:

My family emigrated to Detroit from Poland when I was 8 years old. My father still works for General Motors there. My mom had never had a driver’s license before we moved. Every well-meaning person helping our family to settle in would be quick to tell her that “if you’re not going to learn how to drive, you might as well go back—you can’t survive here if you don’t drive.”

Despite growing up in the Motor City, going to the North American Auto Show every year, and being frequently encouraged to become an engineer by my parents (the Detroit equivalent of immigrants pushing their kids to be doctors or lawyers), I never took to caring about cars. After college I moved to Chicago, then New York, and happily adopted a car-free urban life along with my Millennial cohort—we were killing cars, in addition to marriage and golf. I took it a step further and went to urban-planning school—became the kind of person who peddles 15-minute cities. I made killing car culture my actual job.

When I left New York and moved to L.A., I held strong(ish) for six months before I got a car. It was liberating to drive everywhere—eastside to westside, Malibu, day trips to Death Valley. I worked for the public-transit agency in L.A. You might think that I was a bit of a sham, but most of my colleagues drove to work. Like the many Angelinos who support tax measures to improve transit, we wanted better transit for L.A., but we wouldn’t be taking it to work ourselves. It wasn’t my fault. How else was I supposed to get to the beach and take selfies in the desert on the weekend? As a bonus, my relationship with my dad was on the up now that we had oil changes and cabin filters to talk about.

A few months ago I got a job offer in San Francisco, at an urban-design firm that’s all about building bike-friendly, walkable cities. While I was hesitant to give up my winter tan, the opportunity to reclaim my urban cred in S.F. was a bonus. All the driving in L.A. was getting old, and I missed taking the train to work and walking to get my morning coffee. I moved to the Bay but kept my car. I’ll need it to go on day trips and keep those hiking selfies going.  

The shameful secret not seen in those selfies: I’m three months into living in S.F., in a central, well-connected neighborhood, and I have yet to take public transit. I’ve been walking more—I walk to the gym and to get my coffee, just as I had imagined, but for all intents and purposes I’m stuck on driving. I drive to work many days, even though it’s less than two miles away; I drive to the grocery store; I drive 10 minutes to go on Hinge dates.

I’ve thought about taking the bus or train—I’ve checked routes, but every time I’ve chosen to drive. I always have an excuse: It’s raining; I’ll have to carry things; it’s late; I’m tired. Did L.A. ruin me? Probably not. I’m learning a new city and settling in. Driving feels safer—even though it literally is not—in a new environment. It’s allowed me to see a wider swath of the city in less time. As the weather gets nicer, and I learn the transit routes better, I will settle into a routine that will likely include using transit often.

People choose travel modes based on what is available to them and will maximize personal utility for a particular trip, not based on ideology alone. Like everything else, our ideas around cars have become politicized and positioned as yet another reason to polarize us against one another. As we sit and stare at our crumbling transit systems, the smog hovering above cities, or the annual car-related death tolls, picking a side—pro-car or anticar—isn’t going to help much. The solutions are likely to lie somewhere beyond the corners we’re backing ourselves into. They will require all of the tools and political will available.

If we’re all hovering at the ends of the spectrum, we may fail to see the most impactful solutions available to us. If we approach these challenges with curiosity, seeking to understand rather than debate, we may just come up with new and surprising systems to allow us to safely and sustainably move around and between places.

Much of the plot of Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop is lost to me, though I consider it one of my favorite books. I have a sense that it involves a young priest rising through the ranks of the Catholic Church as New Mexico is flooded by settlers, and I also know that—spoiler alert!—he dies at the end. But what remain indelible are two oddly mathematical vistas. In the novel’s opening pages, a man winds his way through an endless landscape of conical red hills, so alike that “he seemed to be wandering in some geometrical nightmare.” Later, the bishop rides through the country and notices that the world is like a giant mirror: “Every mesa was duplicated by a cloud mesa, like a reflection, which lay motionless above it or moved slowly up from behind it.”

I’ve never been to New Mexico, but I’m half-convinced I have by the clarity of these mental images. That is the power of place in literature, and the closest that prose comes to a magic trick: The best writers can transport you to an utterly different time and location and convince you that you can see it. The believable illusion of a well-written setting is crucial to the workings of storytelling, as Eudora Welty argues in her essay “Place in Fiction.” (Her Collected Stories is included in the list below.) “Fiction is all bound up in the local,” she writes, because “feelings are bound up in place.” The books in this list meld the particular—the quality of the air, say, in Zambia’s Lusaka or the Sahara or a Finnish island—with the abstract and timeless; in short, they capture what it’s like to be alive.

Open Letter Books

Winter in Sokcho, by Elisa Shua Dusapin (translated by Aneesa Abbas Higgins)

“There wasn’t much to do in the winter” in Sokcho, South Korea, the unnamed narrator points out at the beginning of this compact, vivid novel. It’s a beach town that is bustling in the summer; it also sits just more than 35 miles away from the border with North Korea, and “electrified barbed wire fencing” lines the shore. But the chill and damp that saturate the book are central to its meaning. When a French cartoonist comes to stay at the rundown guesthouse the narrator works at, the two find themselves attracted to each other. Together they visit the DMZ, where the cold makes their eyelids stick to the binoculars that let them peer across the border. They eat fish at a drafty seaside food stall and gaze out at Sokcho from a rooftop in the rain, seeing “a jumble of orange and blue corrugated roofs, the burnt-out ruin of the cinema.” The pipes at the guesthouse freeze. These atmospheric details gesture at a deeper stasis: the narrator’s obligations to her mother that keep her in town, the extended war between the Koreas that keeps their citizens “in a winter that never ends.” “That was Sokcho, always waiting,” the narrator thinks, “for tourists, boats, men, spring.”

New York Review Books

The Summer Book, by Tove Jansson (translated by Thomas Teal)

The Summer Book is shelved in the children’s section at my local library, but don’t be fooled by the simplicity of its prose: The novel is painfully profound when it comes to aging and death. Grandmother and young Sophia spend their summers on an island in the Gulf of Finland, making up tales about long-tailed ducks, exploring caves, and arguing about God. Life has an easy, elemental rhythm—the book is composed of vignettes that seem to take place almost outside of time—and yet the story is colored by Grandmother’s dizzy spells and reliance on medication. We slip imperceptibly into the characters’ consciousnesses, particularly Grandmother’s: “The wind was always blowing on this island, from one direction or another … a wild garden for someone growing up, but otherwise just days on top of days, and passing time.” The dead forests, mossy granite, and distant boats are described with the sharpness of lived experience: Jansson herself lived for half of each year on a similar island. Through her characters’ eyes, she conjures the care that stems from decades rooted in a single place, creating an unsentimental yet intimate portrayal of a home.

[Read: The questions we don’t ask our families but should]

Bloomsbury

Stories of the Sahara, by Sanmao (translated by Mike Fu)

In the Chinese-speaking world, the publication of Stories of the Sahara nearly 50 years ago was a literary sensation. Millions of copies have been sold since, in large part because of Sanmao’s wry, approachable, and intensely independent voice. “I’d always felt I wasn’t a part of the world around me,” she writes. “I often needed to go off the tracks of a normal life and do things without explanation”—things such as moving to El Aaiún, the capital of the then–Spanish territory of Western Sahara, propelled by a determination to become “the first female explorer to cross the Sahara.” Instead, her delightful travelogues feel like fables, depicting both the humdrum realities of desert living—the goats that keep falling through the roof of her house, the quirks of the native Sahrawis she and her husband, José, reside with—and the high adventure of escaping quicksand, seeing UFOs, and getting ill perhaps from a possibly cursed necklace. Looking out over the dunes, with their “quiet serenity and profound beauty,” she writes, “inspired an emotion close to pain.” Who wouldn’t be tempted, reading this, to “go off the tracks of a normal life”?

Farrar, Straus, and Giroux

My Garden (Book):, by Jamaica Kincaid

Jamaica Kincaid’s enthusiasm for gardening is contagious, even for someone like me, who has managed to kill a succulent. In the summer, Kincaid writes, she frets about how late her wisterias bloom in her Vermont garden, among her phlox and buddleia and perennial pea, and about a “yellow border” of flowers that simply “does not work.” In the spring, she revels in her fritillarias, which smell like “the underarms of ten people you love.” But gardening for Kincaid isn’t just about tending her plot of land. It’s “an exercise in memory,” and in these short essays, she plumbs the dimensions of her garden beyond its physical realities. Her meditations circle around Antigua, where she was raised: She recalls the soursop tree she was sent to when she misbehaved; the afternoons with her father in the island’s botanical garden, filled with plants from across the British empire and none native to the island itself. Kincaid’s keen awareness of the world outside the garden—that same colonial need for possession shaped the Linnaean system of naming plants, she observes—makes her joy within it all the more satisfying.

[Read: Housekeeping is part of the wild world too]

Mariner

The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty, by Eudora Welty

This volume brings together every short story Welty wrote, the large majority of them set in small-town Mississippi. In the collection, women cluster together, opining, helping out at funerals, and fanning themselves waiting for rain; the men go off to drag the river for drowned bodies. The Natchez Trace, the historic trail that cuts through the state, crops up again and again, a wild, difficult, almost mythical road that looms large in the characters’ minds. Welty is famous for much-anthologized stories like the antic “Why I Live at the P.O.,” but her oeuvre is weird and dreamlike, with a pervading aura of secrecy: In one story, a deaf boy forms an attachment to Aaron Burr at the inn where Burr plans his conspiracy; in another, a girl is kept confined by a husband far too old for her in a plot straight out of a fairy tale. In each, Welty’s precise and lavish descriptions of the world abound—a night sky “transparent like grape flesh,” the “embroidering movements” of insects, the Mississippi River “reaching like a somnambulist driven to go in new places.” Every detail seems to hold meaning, to express some facet of the emotional revelations her characters are continually arriving at. Taken together, the stories feel like a glimpse into the humid, shadowed interior of the state itself.

Berlin, by Jason Lutes

In September 1928, two strangers meet on a train headed into Berlin: Marthe Müller, an artist from Cologne looking for her place in the world, and Kurt Severing, a journalist distraught by the dark political forces rending his beloved city. Lutes began this 580-page graphic novel in 1994 and completed it in 2018, and it’s a meticulously researched, gorgeous panoramic view of the last years of the Weimar Republic. The story focuses most attentively on the lives of ordinary Berliners, including Müller, Severing, and two families warped by the increasing chaos. Certain panels even capture the stray thoughts of city dwellers, which float in balloons above their heads as they ride the trams, attend art class, and bake bread. Throughout, Berlin glitters with American jazz and underground gay clubs, all while Communists clash violently with National Socialists in the streets—one party agitating for workers and revolution, the other seething with noxious anti-Semitism and outrage over Germany’s “humiliation” after World War I. On every page are the tensions of a culture on the brink.

[Read: How Hitler’s enablers undid democracy in Germany]

Hogarth

The Old Drift, by Namwali Serpell

“This is the story of a nation,” the first page of The Old Drift informs us, “so it begins, of course, with a white man.” The nation is Zambia, and the novel traces three families through four generations and a century’s worth of history, including the country’s independence in 1964, the revolutionary fervor of its aftermath, and the turn to economic privatization in the 1990s. Resonant scenes on the Zambezi River bookend the novel, but the families mainly converge upon Lusaka, the capital city, and illuminate its various crannies—high-end hotels, an Indian wig-seller’s shop, the shacks in the Kalingalinga compound—as the characters’ paths intertwine. One woman sees a representative tableau of the city on display in a government office: “Old men in dark suits; young men in lighter suits; young women in skirt suits; old women in chitenges patterned with staplers, stars, turtles, forks.” Places are created by people, as Serpell suggests with her overflowing, diverse cast—her characters are variously of Italian, British, Bemba, and Indian descent. The infinite ramifications of human conflicts and connections are just as important as the landscape.

University of Chicago Press

A River Runs Through It and Other Stories, by Norman Maclean

In the years since I first read this collection’s title story, I’ve never been able to think about fly-fishing without a genuine sense of reverence. The story’s narrator (a close stand-in for the real Maclean) has no idea how to help his troubled brother, Paul, who drinks too much and gets picked up by the police with increasing frequency. The most he can do is take Paul fly-fishing, an art they learned from their father, a Presbyterian minister. Maclean dedicates long, languid passages to the finer points of casting in the “great trout rivers” of western Montana, which manage to be both technical and transcendent: “It was one rhythm superimposed upon another, our father’s four-count rhythm of the line and wrist being still the base rhythm. But superimposed upon it was the piston two count of his arm and the long overriding four count of the completed figure eight of his reversed loop. The canyon was glorified by rhythms and colors.” The beauty of the story lies in its specificity—the summer of 1937 on the Big Blackfoot River—against the sweep of religion, the primeval forces of geology, and the pure ache of loving someone whom you struggle to understand.