Anthony Domesticois chair of the English and Global Literatures Department at Purchase College, and a frequent contributor to Commonweal. His book Poetry and Theology in the Modernist Period is available from Johns Hopkins University Press.
Donna Tartt's "The Goldfinch" and "The Secret History," and Helen Oyeyemi's "Boy, Snow, Bird" are not "literary realism" but something different, and dazzling.
To her fans—and there are many, from critic James Wood to Barack Obama—Robinson shows that old-fashioned virtues like seriousness and simplicity are still virtues.