An entertaining study ? Mr. Ley's mission, it turns out, is to systematize the spontaneous opinion-brokering of which most criticism consists... his attempt to authenticate the position played by the critic in modern life consists in subjugating six of the past quarter-millennium's best-known literary critics to a series of interrogations as to what they stand for, what view they take of books and, if only by implication, what view they take of life itself.