The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James Mc Bride

Wednesday Reviews in Substack: Writing in the New York Finger Lakes

September 4, 2024

The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store published 2023 by Penguin Random House

Book of the year by Amazon and Barnes and Noble, the Kirkus Prize for Fiction and the Jewish Fiction Award.

Serious literary fiction without pretention. That’s what this book is. I encourage you to read the many reviews out there available by Google as well as the book itself (of course). The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store is an acclaimed novel, much admired. It is a finely crafted excellent read. Mc Brise drops pieces of the story all over the place and when you are confused, he brings them all together. I’m going to write about themes McBride tackled instead of singing its praise or summarizing the plot because I don’t want to spoil it. Remember though, he brings them all together in the end.

First, who is James McBride? He is writer in residence at New York University, known for The Color of Water (1995). He is the son of a Christian minister and an observant Jewish mother. His grandmother ran a grocery store. He is a jazz musician. He worked at a summer camp as counsellor for disabled kids. All of that personal history shapes this story which one reviewer called both a flattening and uplifting book. I was uplifted by the casual kindness of people who make promises for a little bit of money and keep them against heart-in-mouth odds. I was terrified by the randomness of chance and fortune. I was given hope when the bad guys died because they deserved it. As McBride wrote “God wrapped his hands around Chicken Hill and wrung the last bit of justice out of that wretched place.”

McBride blends the parts of a rural community located near the Pennsylvania coal mines to create justice of a sort. The Jewish Community stays away from the town fathers who are Christian white men unless there is a job to do. There is a black community living near the Jews up on Chicken Hill. They stick together, more or less for the sake of survival and a sense that they are all in this together. They are all regarded with suspicion. Then there is a black preteen who is deaf and mute called Dodo. He lives at the Heaven and Earth Grocery Store run by a Jewish couple, Chona and Moshe. They care for him and hide him when the authorities come to send him to state school. They know that place is a nightmare. They would never let him go there out of love and compassion and what’s right. But of course he ends up there.

Dodo learns how to help in the store. He plays with the black kids next door. He understands language and learns to read lips. Love is a deep theme in the book. It is disguised, even unspoken, but it drives everything. Jealousy and lust are sources of what’s evil in the book—that and an incipient white Christian privilege, but McBride doesn’t beat that drum. I do. An unrequited white Christian man still carrying a teenage crush on Chona attacks her after years of resentment that amounts to anger she turned him down decades ago. That hurls Dodo into the hands of the authorities. A formidable assailant hurts Dodo leaving us to believe its hopeless, but love wins out and rescues him. The book would be a horror story without love.

The grocery on Chicken Hill is a poor bit of raggedy heaven. People love, care, and scrabble. That constant trying to get around the rules, making things do, making a deal to get ahead is heart breaking on one hand and admirable on another. Sometimes it is shocking. Sometimes it is comical. Poverty is best dealt with slyly and with a laugh.

By contrast the state institution is hell. Dodo is restrained in a ward because he is injured and can’t speak. The authorities assume he is stupid. Dodo is the obvious standard bearer for the theme of disability, but Chona has had polio and seizures. So did her attacker. The boy in the bed next to Dodo has cerebral palsy.  Dodo calls him Monkey Pants for reasons best understood by 12 year old boys. The other boy is also smart but thought stupid because he can’t speak either. The boys creatively find a way to communicate by touch: finger to finger through the bars around their beds. And there are horrors in the state institution. Dodo’s wait for rescue is another piece of flattening. I felt hopeless. Then the folks back home work it out, but his rescue is so haphazard, so given to chance and mischance that it seems impossible. It is all tied up with the synagogue needing a water pipe switched in the well (illegally), new men on the railroad, the Independence Day parade, fireworks, petty crime, debts and murder.

Can anything good rise up out of this mess?

Yes. But how it happens, well that gives you hope for humankind outside of the boundaries of law and order. In an act of lawless resistance justice prevails. I came away from the whole story muttering “men are pigs, but some of them do the right thing anyway,” not always because they know it’s the right thing.

Why did I like the book? It is about everything I care about. Justice, racial and Jewish survival in a biased world, disability struggles that can kill you, compassion, boldness, love. And the twists of fate that spit in the eyes of evil, like a red cobra. Read the book. It will crawl inside you and make you say “Whew!

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