Is it too much to expect of our so-called reviewers and critics to first comprehend (at least try to) a book for themselves before writing about it? This question arises because a couple of `reviews’ on J.M.Coetzee’s two works-The Childhood of Jesus and The Schooldays of Jesus, which I came across in some magazines recently was all about the reviewers’ flaunting of their ignorance and the consequent desperation than anything about the work.  If a work is incomprehensible why write at all about it in the first place? Perhaps to show-off, I have read the book but the author is at fault for not producing a work which is easily understandable or palatable to the reader?

Anyhow, it’s alright being not able to comprehend a work. Coetzee himself makes an admission in The Good Story (his discourses –exchanges being the precise word used in the book--with Arabella Kurtz) when the discussion comes to Sebald’s Austerlitz, he says that despite his admiration for the book, he have struggled with it in the past and still struggle with it. 

So coming back to the Jesus `reviews' or blathers, the problem seems to lie in approaching a work with the anticipation that it will be malleable; it would bend easily to a supine reader's whims...

Milan Kundera in The Art of the Novel warns that like all of the culture, the novel is more and more in the hands of the mass media which “distribute throughout the world the same simplifications and stereotypes easily acceptable by the greatest number, by everyone, by all mankind.” 

The termites of reduction at work?

This Brain Pickings link on Jeanette Winterson's essay "Art Objects" (today's find on twitter) is of utmost relevance in this context.
https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/10/27/jeanette-winterson-art-objects/