Despite my efforts to move on, it seems "The Dale Peck Effect" continues to raise its shaved head over the literary world this summer.

The closely shorn Peck is the former New Republic book critic whose inflammatory reviews of American writers past and present brought him a lot of attention, bad and good, this year.

He has since quit the critics' field to concentrate on his novel writing, but not before leaving a collection of his criticism, "Hatchet Job" (The New Press, $23.95), around for use in stirring the pot now and then.

While I wasn't as smitten with Peck's acerbic analyses as others, it lent a needed boost to a rather dull summer of fiction made more depressing by a federal study last month that reported a decline in literary readership.

Maybe controversial critics like Peck, I speculated, would invigorate the debate about fiction and inspire new readers. Then I moved on to something else and left Peck to others.

Last week, though, a letter arrived from an aggrieved author whose book was knocked around in a review. (This person wants anonymity.) The writer had also read my remarks about Peck.

The upshot of the complaint is that "hatchet jobs" are warranted and effective only if the reviewer has done the homework, as Peck has done, and can back up the arguments with solid examples.

Negative reviews that delight in put-downs and personal remarks without the material to justify them ultimately only hurt literature by failing to take the work seriously.

This opinion -- and it's hard to fault it -- falls under the "snarky" school of critics of book critics.

That school argues that there are reviewers who rap books to "appear funny and smart and a little bit bitchy without attempting to espouse any higher ideals. ...This is wit for wit's sake or hostility for hostility's sake."

Writing for the magazine The Believer last year, novelist Heidi Julavits detailed the snarky school's standards, thus establishing the category.

She then went on to suggest that newspapers, while too dumb to be stylishly snarky, also do a disservice by running reviews that are "advertising posing as criticism."

(I did set Julavits straight on that score and even ran a review praising her new novel, "The Effect of Living Backwards.")

Between Peck and Julavits there's been a badly needed discussion of the book review, but one that should be pushed further.

Despite last month's survey, "Reading at Risk," from the National Endowment for the Arts, books continue to proliferate in the face of a culture growing increasing dependent on cyberspace.

The number of new titles released last year hit around 130,000, a staggering number for readers to figure out. They need guidance now more than ever to find the exceptional book among the stacks and stacks.

That's where book reviews can come in, but where are the people who write them going to come from?

Perhaps the debate might extend to ways to guarantee a supply of qualified critics.

Right now, the selection process is as mysterious as a Ouija Board. There's no Book Critics College or even a "Reviewing for Dummies" guide available.

There are university courses, but when I taught one, I had to provide the reading material because there were no textbooks on the subject.

Then there's the matter of paying qualified writers a decent wage in order to attract and keep them. Few editors are interested in that subject.

Imagine a steady flow of reviews from qualified critics who aren't snarky, hacks or have axes to grind. It's a utopian vision -- and about as likely to come about.

Well, in the meantime, we'll do our best.

*

But, here's an occasion when I did not do my best. In last week's review of Thomas Frank's "What's the Matter With Kansas," I blamed Liberty magazine for predicting an Alf Landon victory over President Roosevelt in 1936. It was Literary Digest. Thanks to several kind callers who pointed out my mistake.

The magazine, which had correctly predicted presidential winners in 1916, 1920, '24, '28 and '32, never recovered from the embarrassment and went out of business a year later.

I know how it felt.