Inflection Points

During that first disorienting year of the pandemic, when there was pressure everywhere and no relief valve, all sorts of organizations sought to capture something of the brittle zeitgeist by commissioning, collecting, or curating COVID‑19 art, for lack of a better term. Hastily compiled short story anthologies soon surfaced, and eventually some retrospectives appeared of works done by artists in — shall we say — captivity. Some people pulled out their old university copies of The Decameron, Giovanni Boccaccio’s fourteenth-century classic about a group of young nobles hiding from the plague ravaging Europe’s medieval cities, and wondered when an updated version would come out. Others reminded us that the 1918–20 flu pandemic, which killed upwards of 50 million people, left virtually no cultural fingerprints, except a few works like Katherine Anne Porter’s Pale Horse, Pale Rider, a thinly veiled memoir of hallucinatory illness that she wrote twenty years...