And so perhaps the backlash was inevitable. Snooty critics are supposed to dump on popular entertainment. But there seemed to be something more at play here, something deeper. The novel, Tartt's third, soared through the winter and spring on a frenzy of love, not just dominating bestseller lists but also award shortlists. When it won the prestigious Pulitzer in April, some literary observers simply could not sit back and observe any longer. It was as if the Nobel Committee had declared the greatest novel of all time. There had to be a response.

Over the summer, magazine set out to discover why the backlash against was so forceful and sustained. "No novel gets uniformly enthusiastic reviews, but the polarised responses to lead to the long-debated questions: what makes a work literature, and who gets to decide?" the magazine asked in its July issue.

Who gets to decide - that, of course, is the crux of it. Time was, a handful of critics decided. Now the great unwashed do so. Mainstream publishers these days send advance copies not just to established professional critics but to amateur book bloggers and Goodreads members. The market is deciding more than it ever has before. Those in the crumbling citadels worry about their influence - and about the ever-accelerating dumbing-down of our tastes, the chipping away at our standards.

"Nowadays, even is afraid to say when a popular book is crap," editor Lorin Stein told .

Perhaps Aaron Sorkin - through actor Judd Hirsch - said it best in the premiere episode of his failed 2006 series : "There's always been a struggle between art and commerce, and now I'm telling you, art is getting its ass kicked, and it's making us mean, and it's making us bitchy. It's making us cheap punks - that's not who we are! People are having contests to see how much they can be like Donald Trump?"

The let-the-masses-decide ethos of the internet era is indeed making the sophisticates bitchy. , in its excellent essay, veers away from to tackle the question of who actually determines what serious literature is. At one point it goes off on a hilarious tangent about how literary lions responded to Tom Wolfe's hugely hyped second novel, 1998's , with the late Norman Mailer insisting that reading it was like having sex with a 300-pound woman: "Once she gets on top it's all over. Fall in love or be asphyxiated."

But let's stick to : will it be remembered - should it be remembered - as 2014's book of the year?

The chief complaint about the novel is that it represents itself as serious fiction, but really it merely mimics serious fiction. It's a big book with a lot going on in it, but its influence is not Dickens, not really, but movies. It is not about ideas or capturing the zeitgeist, and some of the most important characters are little more than caricatures.

is about story. It's almost entirely about story. How will Theo get out of the latest untenable situation he's gotten himself into, and how will he grow up to become, to steal Wolfe's title, a man in full? As screenwriter William Goldman puts it in , his classic book about Hollywood: "There is no time in a screenplay where we can lose them. Because movies keep going, going, going - it's not like a novel where you can go back and reread a section or a paragraph."

That's a strange thing to say about a 700-plus-page novel, but it describes succinctly. Admit it: you didn't sip your tea, re-cross your legs and luxuriate over the prose. You kept going, going, going, as if someone were about to snatch the book from your hands, which someone probably was - your spouse or your best friend or your office mate, whoever had claimed dibs on it when you were done.

The relentlessness of the plot was something the poobahs of literary criticism could latch onto. "Its tone, language, and story belong in children's literature," wrote critic James Wood.

Wood expanded on his opinion for : "Tartt's novel is not a serious one - it tells a fantastical, even ridiculous tale, based on absurd and improbable premises."

Plus, it's full of clichés and other crimes of the everyday, mediocre writer. Francine Prose offered in : "Reading , I found myself wondering, 'Doesn't anyone care how something is written anymore?'" Prose was accused of being unnecessarily nasty in her review, but she later insisted she had no choice but to put the knife in deep. Our literary standards were at stake. "Everyone was saying this is such a great book and the language was so amazing. I felt I had to make quite a case against it," she said.

Many other critics pointed out the same flaws that Prose, Wood and Stein noted - but they loved the book anyway.

NPR's Maureen Corrigan said the plot was "jumbo" and "coincidence-laced". Here's how she finished the paragraph: " far exceeds the expectations of those of us who've been waiting on Tartt to do something extraordinary again, ever since her debut novel, came out in 1992. Hell, I feel like I've been waiting for a novel like this to appear not only since I read , but also since I first read ."

And these criticisms of the novel - "fantastical", "cliché-ridden", "coincidence-laced" - didn't rise up only after jumped to the top of the bestseller lists. The book-industry magazine , which publishes reviews before books hit shelves, wrote that the "symbolic echoes Tartt employs are occasionally heavy-handed, and it's a little too neat that Theo discovers the work of the sublime Dutch master Carel Fabritius, (himself) killed in a powder blast, just before the fateful event that will carry his mother away. Yet it all works." called it an exemplar of "the literature of disaster and redemption" - an unofficial genre that, by definition, is all about story.

Will stand the test of time? Will people be reading it 100 years from now? Probably not. For one thing, technology continues to shrink our attention span, and it's hard to see that train being called back into the station. Will anyone be reading 700-page books in the next century? But even if doesn't stand up there in the literary stratosphere with the best of Joyce and Fitzgerald and Faulkner, so what?

As points out, it works. And for now, at least, that's enough.