by James McBride ★★★★☆
A week or so ago, a co-worker asked me what I was reading. I told her it was "Amazon's Book of the Year, The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store."
"Oh, what's it about?" she asked.
I was around 90 pages in at the time. I thought for a few seconds, and then told her simply, "I'm not sure yet." At that point in the book, I'd been introduced to the setting (1930s Pottstown, PA) and a host of characters (some of which would become important, and others who would never be heard from again), but there was no central conflict so to speak. Was this just going to be one of those "slice of life / character study" books that traces a number of people you get to know, living out their lives in the 1930s, but without any kind of central plot? Well, no...or at least not exactly. More on that momentarily.
There is no singular main character in the The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, but instead a cast of perhaps a dozen around which the story revolves. The setting is the Chicken Hill neighborhood of Pottstown, once a staunchly Jewish section of town, but now (in 1935) predominantly Black. Moshe, owner of the titular store which sits in the middle of Chicken Hill and acts as a de facto town square, is ready to follow in the footsteps of many of his Jewish brethren and move downtown, but his wife, Chona, is adamant they stay. Chona runs the store, and helps much of the poor Black population of Chicken Hill stay afloat, giving away (or "selling on credit", which never comes due) more than she takes in.
After 150 pages or so, McBride eventually gets around to a central event, where we have some idea of the direction the remainder of the story is going to take. When Chona is injured during an altercation at the store, and a young, deaf Black boy named Dodo is taken into custody and sent to the local mental hospital, the primary plot unfolds as members of the Black and Jewish communities come together to devise a way to break Dodo out of his confinement.
There's a lot I liked about The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store. At the same time, there are a few ways I think it could have been better. The plot is simultaneously intricate and muddled, which sounds contradictory, but it's the central challenge I have with this novel. McBride creates dozens of characters and backstories with minute details. Having recently read David Grann's The Wager, a non-fiction account of a shipwreck in the 1740s that's reads more like a Robert Louis Stevenson novel, there were moments reading Heaven and Earth that reminded me of Grann's book and writing style, where it often seemed more like a historical account that resembled a work of fiction rather than an outright novel. Some of the muddling comes from that detailed "history"; some of it comes from, I think, a desire by McBride to pull a bunch of small components together into one grand interconnected finale. He manages to pull off the interconnectivity, for the most part, but the tone and balance of it is off. While the Black community is focused on saving Dodo (with help from the Jewish community), he adds a secondary challenge more directly impacting the Jewish community (getting clean water to the synagogue, with help from the Black community), which pales in comparsion to the gravity of Dodo's situation. That felt like an unnecessary -- or at least imbalanced -- companion plot to resolve at the end of the novel, and it left me wishing an editor would have worked differently with McBride to tweak the structure of the story slightly. There are so many great components here, but the combination of those components sometimes suffered.
The characters McBride creates are nuanced and excellent, and if he wanted, McBride could successfully spin off a dozen novels delving into each of their backstories. However, trimming some of the characters -- there are several that seem like they will play a significant role, only to end up being non-factors and on the periphery of the story -- and focusing the story more on the how a smaller set of characters found common purpose across race and community would have made this so much more powerful for me. Instead, I'm left with that unsteady feeling where I can't tell if this is the most intricately plotted novel I've read this year (well, second-most -- no one is beating The Covenant of Water on that in 2023) or one that spewed from McBride in a flurry of writing, only to be loosely edited together into something that all ends up kind of connecting.
The Amazon Editors called the book "profound as it is ingeniously entertaining, making it one of the great American novels of our time". I thought there was some insightful commentary on marginalized groups in the 1930s and interesting parallels in that respect drawn between the Blacks and Jews of Pottstown, but I wouldn't say it stretched to new levels of profundity. It's good, I'm glad to have read it, but does it rise to the level of "one of the great American novels of our time"? Certainly not. It is worth a read, and it's one that I might find myself appreciating more after a second pass through, but it's a novel that had too many bits that left me wanting something different for me to count it among my favorite books this year.