The New York Times has given its double-review treatment (one in the daily paper, another in the book review, and both raves) to "Red Plenty," a chronicle by Frances Spufford that came out a couple of years ago in England but has just been published in the United States by Graywolf Press, a well-intentioned but highly errant independent publisher with a dubious eye for indigenous literature (few if any of its American books have made much of a splash.) As usual with chronicles, reviewers are primarily concerned with just what kind of book it is, Andrew Meier calling it "a genre-bender — part novel, part history" and Dwight Garner, quoting the author's own tussle with explaining what he is up to, writes that the book is "not quite history and not quite fiction but something in between, a mongrel narrative in which an 'idea is the hero.' Those four words can make you scan for the exit signs." But though the subject of the chonicle could also not easily be less promising -- Soviet Russia in the 1950s and ’60s -- both reviewers were ravished by Spufford's creative treatment of it and the quality of his prose, Garner writing that he wanted, at the end of the first chapter, to give the author a standing ovation.
