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A review by mburnamfink
The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride
3.0
The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store is a meandering historical novel, mostly about intertwined Jewish, Negro, and White communities of Pottsville Pennsylvania around 1936. The Jews and the Negros live on Chicken Hill, a hardscrabble muddy neighborhood without paved roads or proper plumbing.
The story arcs around several main characters. Moshe runs a pair of dance halls that book Jewish and Negro musicians. His wife Chona is the daughter of the former rabbi and runs the titular grocery store, which offers a lot of credit to the neighbors. Nate is Moshe's house manager, a tough and taciturn black man who does everything that needs doing. Addie is Nate's wife, and also Chona's nurse as Chona suffers an unknown degenerative illness. Fatty is another black man who runs a jook, as well as a thousand other miscellaneous schemes, and Soap is Fatty's Italian best friend. And there's secondary and tertiary characters galore, down to microscopic differences in where the Jews came from, as well as the graduations of social rank among the Negros. Of course, the basic law is that they're all below even the meanest White man.
The book opens in 1972 with a mysterious skeleton, likely the victim of a murder, as if to gesture at a plot. But nothing happens for quite a while, until our main characters are sheltering a Deaf Negro boy named Dodo from the state, and local doctor and KKK leader Doc Roberts arrives at the grocery store. Plot ensues, Dodo winds up in a horrific state sanitarium, and everybody has to work together to get him back.
What works is the sepia-colored reconstruction of history. McBride is both Jewish and Black, and I can say that the Jewish half hit home pretty well. There are my people, though with a lot of the rough edges smoothed off. Characterization is less solid. An adage that I believe in is that novels are defined by the choices a character makes. In this book, there are less choices and more extrapolations of an essential nature of each character. Chona is principled and feisty. Doc Roberts is malevolent and self-centered. And so on.
Everything winds up tidily enough, but the artifice is evident. Compared to some literature I've read, individual bits are nice and there is a plot, eventually, but this book is less than the sum of its whole.
The story arcs around several main characters. Moshe runs a pair of dance halls that book Jewish and Negro musicians. His wife Chona is the daughter of the former rabbi and runs the titular grocery store, which offers a lot of credit to the neighbors. Nate is Moshe's house manager, a tough and taciturn black man who does everything that needs doing. Addie is Nate's wife, and also Chona's nurse as Chona suffers an unknown degenerative illness. Fatty is another black man who runs a jook, as well as a thousand other miscellaneous schemes, and Soap is Fatty's Italian best friend. And there's secondary and tertiary characters galore, down to microscopic differences in where the Jews came from, as well as the graduations of social rank among the Negros. Of course, the basic law is that they're all below even the meanest White man.
The book opens in 1972 with a mysterious skeleton, likely the victim of a murder, as if to gesture at a plot. But nothing happens for quite a while, until our main characters are sheltering a Deaf Negro boy named Dodo from the state, and local doctor and KKK leader Doc Roberts arrives at the grocery store. Plot ensues, Dodo winds up in a horrific state sanitarium, and everybody has to work together to get him back.
What works is the sepia-colored reconstruction of history. McBride is both Jewish and Black, and I can say that the Jewish half hit home pretty well. There are my people, though with a lot of the rough edges smoothed off. Characterization is less solid. An adage that I believe in is that novels are defined by the choices a character makes. In this book, there are less choices and more extrapolations of an essential nature of each character. Chona is principled and feisty. Doc Roberts is malevolent and self-centered. And so on.
Everything winds up tidily enough, but the artifice is evident. Compared to some literature I've read, individual bits are nice and there is a plot, eventually, but this book is less than the sum of its whole.