Discussed in this essay:

Where Reasons End, by Yiyun Li. Random House. 192 pages. $25.

The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America, by Greg Grandin. Metropolitan Books. 384 pages. $30.

Time and Its Adversaries in the Seleucid Empire, by Paul Kosmin. Harvard University Press. 392 pages. $55.

Ten years ago, a week after his sixtieth birthday, and six months after his first appointment with an oncologist, my father died. That afternoon, I went to my parents’ bedroom to clear up the remains…