In order for an author to be successful in literary fiction, positive reviews from important critics are absolutely vital. In popular fiction, the only critics who really matter are the readers who pay money to buy books of their own choice. Reviews are irrelevant to sales. Readers of popular fiction judge an author by his or her ability to make the common language uncommonly meaningful, and to make an oftentold tale freshly exciting. The amount of effort a reader puts into this fiction is minimal.
Critics are human.
They don't like being irrelevant. Marx, Freud, and Sartre are the Muses of modernism. Life is seen as fundamentally absurd. No matter how an individual strives, nothing significant will change. Or, in more accessible language, you can't win for losing.