How does Philip Roth use imagery in The Ghost Writer?

Imagery:

"To me the lined face and the shadowy, timorous manner bore witness to a grinding history of agonized childbearing and escapes from the Indians, of famine and fevers and wagon-train austerities—I just couldn't believe that she could look so worn down from living alongside E.I. Lonoff while he wrote short stories for thirty years."

"On her head was the white wool cap with the long tassel that ended in a fluffy white ball. Of course! He had given it to her, her first winter here in the Berkshires; and now she could not part with it, no more than she could part with him, her second Pim."