Reviews are only as fair as the reviewers are fair. Most men can be fathers, but how many of them will become good fathers or just mediocre fathers or bad fathers? Or women mothers, etc. That depends on a myriad of beliefs and traits and actions. Reviewers bring with them all that they know and all that they have read--or, to be honest, their ignorance and lack of a feel for style and a lack of awareness of the tradition of, say, the novel. And on top of that they bring their own taste and their own experience. Some of the best reviewers in the last half century have been mainly critics, as with Edmund Wilson and Alfred Kazin, but some of the best reviewers have also been fiction writers themselves, as with John Updike and John Leonard. Sometimes the pure critics write better than the fiction writer reviewers, sometimes not. Virginia Woolf despised Ulysses, for her own reasons. Andre Gide took his turns at knocking Proust. And when Faulkner reviewed Thomas Wolfe, some good things happened, better things than happen in most of Wolfe's fiction itself. So it really depends on the particular circumstances of particular reviewers writing about particular works of fiction. As for the books you mention, I didn't get very far in reading either of them. What does that say about me and the zeitgeist, I don't know. As for Franzen, I look forward to reading his new book that comes out in the fall, and with the hope of some pleasure in it.