Ask Benjamin Moser which work of Dutch art he would nominate if only a single piece could be saved from war, plague, climate change, robot uprising, or some other calamity, and he is quick to answer—though with something of a cheat. Speaking with Kirkus via Zoom from his home in the Netherlands, Moser says that he would choose a series of eight paintings by the great Golden Age artist Frans Hals, some 75 feet long in total, that depict 84 residents of the city of Haarlem, painted over the course of a half a century.

“The paint is laid on in liberal quantities. Though the colors are few—black and brown for Zaffius’ clothing, yellows and reds and whites for his face and beard—Hals wrings every nuance out of them.” So Moser writes, in The Upside-Down World: Meetings With the Dutch Masters (Liveright/Norton, Oct. 10), of one of Hals’ subjects, a Catholic survivor of Holland’s religious wars named Jacobus Zaffius. Though Zaffius represents a dark past, Hals looks confidently toward a better future, bathing his subject in an ennobling golden light. There’s plenty more going on in those eight extraordinary panels, which inspired the likes of Monet and Van Gogh. Says Moser, “When Holland floods and is sunk to the bottom of the ocean, which seems to be not too far off for any of us, I’ll try to get those to higher ground if I can.”

A native of Houston and onetime resident of Brooklyn—where he lived while working in publishing in Manhattan, “answering the phone, making photocopies, all the stuff that you do when you get out of college”—Moser has lived and worked in the Netherlands for the last 20 years, making his present home near the small Dutch city from which Brooklyn takes its name and, coincidentally, not far from Hals’ beloved Haarlem. “I love it here,” he says. “I can look out this window, and I can see a thousand-year-old cathedral. You know, when you’re from Texas, that’s really cool.”

Meeting his partner, Arthur Japin, a novelist and native of Holland, made leaving New York easier, though he immediately found himself facing the challenge of all people living outside their homelands: learning to negotiate the rules of a new culture. Practically from the moment Moser arrived, he began writing a rapidly accumulating set of notes on one of his great passions—namely art and its makers, which he used as a vehicle for getting to know his newfound country. That “sentimental education,” as he calls it, is ongoing, but in that mountain of notes on the likes of Johannes Vermeer, Rembrandt, Carel Fabritius, and other Dutch masters, he eventually discerned the shape of The Upside-Down World. “I started reading through it,” he says, “and I thought, well, it’s not a book yet, but it could be.”

Passion is a keyword, for Moser approaches Dutch art not as an exercise in technical criticism or artistic technique but instead as one of appreciation for the often turbulent lives of Dutch artists in the context of turbulent times: wars, plagues, floods, famine, and religious and political divisions that make the current American scene look tame.

For all the tumult of their lives and times, these artists created works of spectacular beauty. One of Moser’s favorite artists, Pieter de Hooch, endured a tormented period after the death of his wife, during which he raised his family alone. Yet in the work of that sad time de Hooch conjured what Moser characterizes in the book as a “prosperous land of clean and happy homes” where everyone had plenty of food to eat and children were pampered and loved. Moser first encountered de Hooch’s work in a small museum in Connecticut, and he allows that the viewing may have planted in him the seed for moving abroad. “You see his paintings, and they’re just so warm,” Moser says. “There’s something so peaceful about them. There’s something so nice about the picture they offer of adult life, of families and their homes. You know, I was living in a 12th-floor walkup in Brooklyn before Brooklyn was cool, and the idea of living in a light-filled, perfectly clean, perfectly harmonious home really stuck with me.”

He now lives in such a home, a base for his travels throughout Holland while writing The Upside-Down World, which took him the full 20 years to complete. Of course, that’s not all Moser occupied himself with, for during those two decades he also wrote two highly regarded biographies, the first on writer Clarice Lispector, who lived in a coastal Brazilian city once ruled by the Dutch, the second a Pulitzer Prize–winning life of Susan Sontag.

Both books fed into his latest—the Lispector by illuminating 17^th-century Dutch culture in a setting far from its homeland, the second by giving him a way to approach the Dutch art he saw around him in venues ranging from international museums to dusty village archives, all part of what he calls “the intellectual adventure of trying to figure it all out.”

Without Sontag’s influence, Moser says, he might never have approached the work of Jan Steen as a species of camp. “Steen is famously fun and jolly and had too much to drink,” Moser says. “He’s probably sleeping with a hooker, and he’s probably sneaking out of the back room of the bar so his wife doesn’t find him.” As playful as they are, he adds, Steen’s works are “extremely serious, beautiful paintings that you can hang next to Rembrandts or Vermeers.” That mix of the comic and the representational could have turned into something like a velvet Elvis painting in the local thrift store, but in the hands of Steen, it became a rich and, yes, campy commentary on the mores of his day.

A work of high seriousness itself, The Upside-Down World is full of good-natured humor, much of it directed at Moser’s efforts to “figure it all out.” The Dutch are like Americans in many ways, he notes: Both live in a multicultural society, a nation of immigrants sometimes riven by controversy and division. The book, he adds, is really “an immigrant’s memoir”—an immigrant as distinct from an expat, the former being someone who is serious about making a home in a new culture. “Immigrants often know a lot more than natives about the culture they’re in,” Moser says, “because they’re more observant. They have to learn the language, have to think about the culture and how they relate to it. I ask myself, What are the things I admire about life in Holland? What are the things I think are ridiculous about it? Conceptualizing it that way is kind of weird, I guess, but it’s helped me think about where I am.”

While there are things about his homeland, and especially Texas, that he misses, Moser feels quite at home in the Netherlands. His Dutch compatriots, it seems, feel the same, for his book will soon appear in Dutch translation, which he hopes will invite readers to discover more about their own culture and country. There’s plenty left for him to learn, too, he reckons, and plenty more art to study. “It’s not called the Golden Age for nothing,” he says. “It’s where all these unbelievable figures, from Rembrandt to Vermeer to all the other people I write about, lived and created art. I could write three more volumes without even getting to the B-list.”

Gregory McNamee is a contributing writer.