Trust the Critic?

I have a working theory that honest criticism, when it comes to new fiction, is getting more difficult to find. This is the fault of institutions—professional book review sections, magazines, and journals. As the mainstream media withers, so do book reviews and broader arts coverage, and there are fewer institutional voices to turn to, critics who are paid a living wage to make sense of what is newly published. New novels from prestige presses have been hyped since time immemorial. What is changing, I believe, is that fewer and fewer of these books warrant the hype. Many of them just aren’t very good.