Book Review: ‘The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store,’ by James McBride

THE HEAVEN & EARTH GROCERY STORE, by James McBride

A few weeks ago, around the same time I was working on this review, I visited the Guggenheim with my fiancé. The exhibition on display as we trekked up the museum’s famous spiral was “Measuring Infinity,” a marvelous retrospective on the work of the great Venezuelan artist Gego. A German Jew who fled Nazi persecution in Europe, Gego arrived in Venezuela in 1939 and went on to become one of the most important artists to emerge from Latin America in the 20th century. Her work speaks to a deep curiosity about the interrelation of shapes, things and the dimensions created by those relationships.

Maybe it was her obsession with structure and connectivity (which for me screams community), or maybe it was my awe as I stood in the middle of Gego’s wire galaxy of lines and points, but whatever it was, something prompted me to turn to my fiancé and say, “The book I’m reading is just like this.” To which he replied, “Well, it must be incredible then, too.” And he was absolutely right. “The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store,” the latest novel from the best-selling, National Book Award-winning author James McBride, moves with the precision, magnitude and necessary messiness of some of Gego’s most inspired structures.

The book is a murder mystery locked inside a Great American Novel. The story opens in 1972, with the discovery of a skeleton buried in a well in Pottstown, Pa. The identity of the corpse is unknown but the few clues found (a belt buckle, a pendant and a mezuza) lead authorities to question the only Jewish man remaining from the town’s formerly vibrant Jewish community. However, instead of a simple whodunit, the novel leaves the bones behind and swings back to the 1920s and ’30s, to Chicken Hill, the neighborhood in Pottstown where Jewish, Black and immigrant folks make their homes. It’s a community of people bonded together by the links of love and duty, and it’s here that McBride’s epic tale truly begins.

We first meet Moshe Ludlow, a Romanian Jew who owns the local theater and dance hall, and his wife, Chona, a headstrong, mighty-hearted American-born Jew who operates the grocery store for which the book is named. The grocery costs Moshe and Chona more money than it makes because Chona allows many of Chicken Hill’s Black and European immigrant residents to take out lines of credit that she never asks them to make good on. As the story sets off, we watch Moshe and Chona observe their ever-diversifying community from their respective posts: Moshe watching via his theater and an increasingly sick Chona from the store.

McBride takes his time unfurling the story from there, introducing more and more Chicken Hill residents in the novel’s first third, which might leave some readers feeling as though the plot stalls before it even starts. The action is eventually set into motion when Nate Timblin — a Black man who works at Moshe’s theater and who is both respected and feared by the town’s Black population — asks Chona and Moshe to help hide an orphaned deaf Black child named Dodo, whom state officials are searching for and plan to institutionalize. While Moshe is resistant, Chona, who champions the most vulnerable in Chicken Hill, is adamant about helping. For Chona Dodo’s presence comes to represent the goodness and light of Judaism, “folded neatly into the sunshine reality” of the boy. Her drive to protect that light ultimately stirs the citizens of Chicken Hill to protect Dodo too.

McBride knows that the best storytellers take their time and get lost in the details, that tangents can turn into gold in the right author’s grip. This is a novel in which even the smallest points echo into larger consequences elsewhere. A puff of smoke Moshe sees in the distance while on a walk is later revealed to be the accident that deafened Dodo and set him on the path toward the Ludlows’ protection. Gossip from a side character’s mother turns out to divulge one of the story’s most damning secrets. These links make it a pleasure to be caught in the web of McBride’s narration, showcasing how he can pick up a character from any far-reaching corner of his imagination and imbue them with their own peculiar life, all while still moving the novel forward in unexpected ways.

His style here won’t please readers who want the author to cut to the chase, and I’ll admit that early on I felt annoyed when yet another new character would take center stage instead of the novel getting on with this business of who did what, how come and what’s going to happen to Dodo? But McBride’s story is not to be rushed; he wants to show you the whole world. He wants to build this community and display its full constellation of characters, all of whom orbit around one another with different gravities, pushing and pulling the story in different directions. The skeleton at the novel’s start is almost forgotten as the story lives in the town’s past, patiently braiding a tale of this large cast as we make our way back to those promised bones.

While McBride makes clear that this novel is about connection, he also seems interested in what is unknowable or untranslatable across difference. Though they operate in the same spheres, the people of Chicken Hill are separated from one another by racial and ethnic divisions. “The old ways will not survive here,” Moshe writes to a friend when he learns that he has miscalculated the musical tastes of Chicken Hill’s growing Latino population. “There are too many different people. Too many different ways.” That type of misunderstanding happens on a smaller, interpersonal scale too. For instance, to Moshe, Nate is just a dependable helpmate, but to Chicken Hill’s Black population, Nate is a man with a dark past, a man who is kind but who sometimes gets so angry that his eyes burn “with dark, murderous rage.”

By showcasing neighbors misunderstanding neighbors, McBride shines a light on how communities in America are at times walled apart by difference, even in intimate relationships. Through this story, he asks: How do racial and class divides manifest in how we know and see one another and in how we allow ourselves to be known and seen?

“The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store” is a charming, smart, heart-blistering and heart-healing novel. Great love bursts through these pages via the friends and families that mobilize to protect Dodo, a child endangered by the structures he was born into and injured by. With this story, McBride brilliantly captures a rapidly changing country, as seen through the eyes of the recently arrived and the formerly enslaved people of Chicken Hill. He has reached back into our shared past when, by migration and violence, segregation and collision, America was still becoming America. And through this evocation, McBride offers us a thorough reminder: Against seemingly impossible odds, even in the midst of humanity’s most wicked designs, love, community and action can save us.

Danez Smith is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently “Homie,” which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the NAACP Image Award.

THE HEAVEN & EARTH GROCERY STORE | By James McBride | 385 pp. | Riverhead Books | $28