Kerry:
I like your point, though I wonder if cultivating a few trusted critics in this world of opinion overload isn't more important than ever. I'm not sure it's so much a case of proliferation of critics as erosion of the name critic's role by the disappearance of newspapers. This is currently creating a confusion that may, I hope, be temporary.
Here's an interesting site for movie reviews that provides a number of review sources for each film currently showing: http://www.metacritic.com/ You can begin to get a real sense of a certain critic as reliable or not this way. It would be interesting to see if something like this developed for books, though I've not heard of any such project yet.
BTW: In today's NYT, Larry Rohter made this remark in his review of The Black Minutes by Martin Solares: "The best detective novels are those that go beyond the limitations of genre and a specific story to limn the broader society in which they take place." This kind of thing always irks. I would say only the worst novels of any sort DON'T "limn" the broader society in which they take place, but even that's a bloated generalization waiting to be punctured. (Does Kafka's The Metamorphosis "limn the broader society," or does it go for something much deeper?)
But I digress.
David Corbett
www.davidcorbett.com
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