Bring Out Your Dead: Elegies from the Plague Year

Could the shlock-rock ’70s band Kiss in any way affect the outcome of a death-dealing twenty-first-century virus? Is Bob Ross—that permed, inimitable painter of Edenic nostalgia on PBS—actually an emissary from the land of personal loss? Might the work of Edward Hopper reflect facets of a global plague? What is the grammar, finally, of grief, of isolation?

The essays in Chad Davidson’s Bring Out Your Dead: Elegies from the Plague Year mainly concern the loss of the author’s father directly...