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‘We are poor passing facts / warned by that to give / each figure in the photograph / his living name,’ writes Robert Lowell His poem ‘Epilogue’ is a lament at its writer’s inability ‘to make something imagined, not recalled’ Lowell desires the rich lucidity of a painter’s vision and instead finds himself armed only with a crude lens:   But sometimes everything I write with the threadbare art of my eye seems a snapshot, lurid, rapid, garish, grouped, heightened from life, yet paralysed by fact   Writing as painting, writing as photography — neither simile entirely fitting or true ‘Books are not mirrors, and life doesn’t go onto the page like life, but like writing,’ wrote Lynne Tillman in her essay ‘The Last Words Are Andy Warhol’, collected in What Would Lynne Tillman Do? In her new novel, Men and Apparitions, something similar is suggested of photography: photographs do not reflect life, they reflect photography — the medium and its mediations, both imagined and recalled What this means is one of the central preoccupations of the book’s narrator, Ezekiel (Zeke) Stark, a 38-year-old East Coast American academic (or as he might say, ‘acadoomic’) ethnographer who studies ‘society through images, in words and pix, in how individuals see themselves, in past and present tenses, and with what they identify, which are also images’   Zeke’s professional speciality is the family photograph album, and Men and Apparitions is both the story of Zeke’s own family and of the family, told through an album-like collage of portraits and snapshots, posed and impromptu, at once public and private, that move in and out of focus, collapse in stories shared and divergent: a twenty-first-century revision, perhaps, of Edward Steichen’s 1955 photography exhibition The Family of Man, one in which images are inherently self-conscious, complex and contradictory — just like the lives of those they depict, or in many cases, leave undeveloped There is Zeke, the middle child of a middle-class suburban family, raised outside Boston (‘John Updike Territory Nice Family place, if you didn’t know the family Kidding’) There is Mother, an accomplished editor; Father, an alcoholic; Bro Hart, aggressive and disdainful older brother,