THENEWYORKER, APRIL 18, 2022 59ants in the fields, French art left little
mark, and seems rather to have shown
him how essentially American he was.
He displayed no interest in going back.
He was restless, though, and may have
been dissatisfied. He had begun to paint
in watercolor for the first time since
his youth; he made increasing use of
photographs; he travelled from one pic
turesque locale to another, as though
in search of a purpose like that he had
felt during the war. No one has sug
gested a better reason for his heading
back South just as the situation there
was once again becoming dire.I
n 1877, with the new politics of Pres
ident Rutherford B. Hayes, remain
ing Federal troops in the South were re
lieved of the task of enforcing racial
justice. Reconstruction was at an end,
and the widespread result, through a
combination of disenfranchisement,
economic exploitation, and violence, was
a return to a system hardly different from
slavery. Homer was in Virginia that
spring, and was likely also there the pre
vious year, despite being reproved and
even threatened by local whites for show
ing undue interest in Black life. The work
he did affirms that they had cause for
concern. “A Visit from the Old Mistress,”
of 1876, offers a confrontation between
the white woman who has entered stiffly
into former slave quarters and three Black
women who regard her steadily, without
greeting; the air is thick with distrust,
the gap between them fraught with un
resolved history. Painted the same year,
“The Cotton Pickers” displays two for
merly enslaved young women, akin to
Millet’s peasants, looming like goddesses
against a clouded sky yet wholly trapped—
as they must know—in a field of cotton
overspilling and blindingly infinite. Like
the wheat of “Veteran in a New Field,”
the cotton suggests more than itself, but
shares only the sorrow of that Northern
crop and none of its hope.
The celebratory preparations of
“Dressing for the Carnival,” of 1877, have
such a brightly colored, singing beauty
that tragedy takes hold only on exam
ination. A group of figures, all African
American, are gathered in a sunny yard.
Two women are stitching a young man
into a brilliant Harlequin costume, while
a scattered group of barefoot children,
some holding tiny American flags, lookBRIEFLY NOTED
The Believer, by Sarah Krasnostein (Tin House). The line be
tween fact and fiction blurs to revelatory effect in this ac
count of ghost hunters, death doulas, sixday creationists,
U.F.O. investigators, and others who hold ideas at odds with,
as the author judiciously puts it, “more accepted realities.”
Krasnostein spends years among her subjects, in Australia
and the U.S., hoping to reach an intimate understanding of
what drives their devotion. Though her approach is journal
istic, pure objectivity proves impossible; an attempt to bond
with a group of Mennonite women in the Bronx falters be
cause “they believe I am going to Hell and I believe they
may already be living in one.” Ultimately, it is Krasnostein’s
dawning awareness of herself as a believer which brings a
kind of enlightenment.The Subplot, by Megan Walsh (Columbia Global Reports). In
addition to providing succinct assessments of such writers
as the Nobel laureate Mo Yan, the dissident Ma Jian, and
the sciencefiction visionary Liu Cixin, this survey of con
temporary Chinese literature considers less prominent fig
ures. We learn about migrantworker poets who record the
dislocations of factory life, writers from the persecuted Uy
ghur and Tibetan minorities, and the legions of Internet
writers who compete for the attention of four hundred and
thirty million online readers. Walsh writes, “Modern Chi
nese fiction is a mixture of staggering invention, bravery, and
humanity, as well as soulcrushing submission and pragma
tism—a confusing and intricate tapestry that offers a beguil
ing impression of Chinese society itself.”The Pages, by Hugo Hamilton (Knopf ). The narrator of this
timely mystery is a sentient book—a first edition of “Rebel
lion” by Joseph Roth—that “can tell when history is in dan
ger of repeating itself.” Having once belonged to a Jewish
professor and having narrowly escaped Nazi book burning
while hidden beneath a student’s coat, the volume is now in
the hands of that student’s granddaughter, an artist who has
travelled from New York to Berlin in an effort to locate a
place depicted in a handdrawn map on a blank page. The
book—variously stolen, returned, defaced by a neoNazi, in
corporated into an art work—repeatedly bears witness to
lovers’ desperate hopes for stability amid political violence.Portrait of an Unknown Lady, by María Gainza, translated
from the Spanish by Thomas Bunstead (Catapult). In Buenos
Aires, a young auctionhouse employee turned art critic nar
rates her obsessive quest to find and understand a notorious
art forger. Her search is propelled by disenchantment with
the art world and a “melancholic desire for some intangible
thing.” The novel considers whether forgery itself can be
original—“I sometimes wonder if art fraud wasn’t the twen
tieth century’s single greatest piece of art”—and circles themes
of truth, falsehood, legend, and virtuosity. According to the
narrator, “Reality is perhaps a thing too inherently ruinous
for there to be any abiding certainty about it.”