One of the many clever strokes in Andrew O’Hagan’s 2024 novel Caledonian Road was casting his floundering, public intellectual hero as the author of a best-selling biography of Johannes Vermeer. Given the paucity of facts about Vermeer’s life and the thoroughness with which that paucity has been picked over, knowledgeable readers may have sniffed, but the joke is on the sniffers, since the fictional biography is pointedly a book about an absent subject—an outline around essential emptiness. (Needless to say, there’s a metaphor there.)

The biography’s success nets its author lucrative gigs with fashion houses, which should be preposterous, but the current state of real-world Vermeer fandom makes it believable.…