SOURCE: Olshan, Joseph. “Meet a Despotic Octogenarian and His Utopian Marketplace.” Chicago Tribune Books (15 November 1992): 3.

In the following review, Olshan offers a positive assessment of Arcadia.

Joining the literature of Utopia is this new entry from novelist Jim Crace, author of The Gift of Stones. Arcadia is a book that conjures up a marketplace so perfect that it dares to offer the experience of shopping as spiritual alternative:

Four spectacular glass ovals which seemed both like cakes and the domes of viscous mosques. … Nine tapering barrel-vaulted aisles—space-framed in wood and steel, space-glazed—radiated from the center without geometric logic but in the pleasing, balanced way that surface roots spread out from trees.

This description of a climate-controlled environment is the proposed architectural renovation for The Soap Market, a venerated fruit-and-vegetable bazaar that lies at the heart of Crace's offbeat yet masterly novel.

Located in an unnamed English...