If the last quarter of 2024 hadn’t been so crazy with birthdays, anniversaries, holidays, illness, and everything else life throws at you when you have kids of “disease-vector” age, I might have gotten to this critique sooner. I wanted to read The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride much earlier in 2024, but the community hadn’t voted for it until September. After a halted attempt in early October, I picked up the book again just before Christmas and started reading. It was determined to be the Best Book of 2023 by Barnes & Noble and was rated highly in many other literature rankings of that year. But is it worth the hype? Or should you put it back on the shelf and opt for something else? Let’s find out.
Summary
Moshe and Chona are the last two Jewish people living on Chicken Hill in Pottstown, PA. Moshe wants to move to downtown Pottstown, but Chona insists on staying. She doesn’t mind the black community that is taking over; she loves them. Chona walks with a limp due to childhood illness and uses this disability to coerce her husband into staying. He agrees and lets her carry on with her passion for running the Heaven and Earth grocery store.
Moshe and Chona are unable to have children, and when a local deaf black boy, Dodo, needs saving from the white supremacists who are trying to incarcerate him in a mental institution, Chona takes him in and provides him a home. They use the neighbor’s yard to hide Dodo whenever someone comes looking. The neighbor is a childhood friend of Chona’s with many black children from many black fathers.
One day while Chona and Dodo are working at the grocery store, the racist doctor of Pottstown comes in to search for him. Chona signals for Dodo to hide, and Dodo crawls into the basement and looks up through the floor to watch Chona’s confrontation with the doctor. She falls ill, the doctor molests her, Dodo tries to save her, and the doctor brings down the police on Dodo, who jumps from the roof to try to escape. Unfortunately, he breaks his body and winds up healing in the mental institution Chona tried to keep him out of.
The rest of the book follows the black community trying to free Dodo from the hospital and the Jewish community trying to deal with the fallout from the scene in the grocery store. These two communities share a common feeling of being outcasts from the white people of Pottstown and work with each other to try and solve the problems each faces separately.
Scoring
Character – ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Literary fiction lives off of the characters. Without strong characters and detailed understandings of how and what they believe, the genre would probably have collapsed under the weight of more catchy fiction like fantasy and romance. Thus, for a work of literary fiction to gain so much attention it ought to have solid characters. This book has them in spades. It is quite frankly one of the best parts of this novel. The characters drive everything and I love it.
Setting – ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
When it rains on Chicken Hill I feel like I am standing in a doorway listening to the patter on the roofs, smelling the unique bloom of a thirst-quenched land, and watching the drops plunk into the growing puddles left behind in the mud by shoes made from the expert hands of European Jews. The setting is another strong hallmark of good literary fiction. Without a sense of place, the genre would wilt against the strong world-building of science fiction and fantasy. I’m glad to sense this novel as if I were there.
Plot – ⭐⭐⭐⭐
The story takes a long time to get off the ground. We spend many pages living alongside the two remaining Jewish people on Chicken Hill before the central tension of the story is introduced. There is also a huge question I had about why we get Malachi coming to Moshe so early on to heal his wife. Then there is none of Malachi for most of the novel until the end. This reads as realistic to how people come in and out of our lives, but after he left I’m confused about why he was even there to begin with. I’m sure there is some allusion or meaning behind this, but I don’t grasp it readily, and after other issues I have with the story I’m not willing to sit with it, so it feels like a weak point. However, if you spend time thinking about it, you might like the meaning you find; I’m just not willing to. The plot flows from the characters quite well so I only mark one star against it.
Form – ⭐
The narrator has a strong voice and style. This is appealing. A strong narrator can pull the reader along, especially when significant portions of the book are not “in-scene” but told to us as a tale around the campfire (given the acknowledgments and the discussion of the camp, this feels like the intent of the narrative style chosen). The selected narrator does well as a third-person omniscient POV.
However, there are two sections where this narrator’s voice pulls me out of the narrative dream we seek from novels. At the end of Part 2, the narrator “zooms” far into the future to rail against the loss of immigrant culture in the America of cell phones. This is so far detached from the narrative up to that point it feels like the narrator got a hair up his/her butt and started to rail against modernity before ending the section in a huff. The “sleepless dream” is ruined at that moment. Stop it! Leave me alone. I want to read on.
But then this happens again at the end of the book before the Epilogue. This time with an aside about the dynamics of white-power and the American ruling class. The interruption to the dream makes me want to shout, “Get back to what’s important. Get back to the story.”
The problem with these two sections is they are so out of place that the narrative flow is interrupted like a halted orgasm. It’s different when a character like Miggy, an oracle of the community, makes a statement about the cultural woes felt by the black people of Chicken Hill. She’s doing it as a character. But I’m frustrated that the narrator steps in so aggressively during these two moments to share a social message, even if it is one I can get behind. Let the novel be a novel. Don’t hand-hold us by explicitly stating the message. Let it simmer in the back of our minds, please.
Quality – ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Another important aspect of literary fiction is the quality. I could have put my issues with the form in quality since there is a case to be made for doing so, but I put them in form and as a result, the quality score is strong. It is well-written and reads nicely. There are no major issues with the text, so I have little to mark against it.
Enjoyment – ⭐x 2
Up until the end of Part 2, I was enjoying the book quite a lot. It was interesting and full of power dynamics among social classes devalued by the culture of the time. I thought it was well worth the title of Best Book of 2023.
However, when that zoom-out happened and the social criticism was hurled at modernity, I cried foul. The worst part is that I don’t necessarily disagree with James McBride’s points. His criticism rings true to me. But he does it in such a blatant and heavy-handed manner that I am screaming at the book, “Why did you do this?” I did not like that break of the sleepless dream, and I never forgave the book that transgression.
Worse, he does it again at the end of the novel. Are you kidding me? At that point, I went back to see if he made this same mistake in Part 1. He did not. So it wasn’t part of some strong narrator that gets heavy-handed at the end of each section, it’s just not good. Everything else was so well done, this is the black spot of the novel I can’t look away from. I start to mistrust the narrator after the first failure, and I completely step away after the second. I HATED those social commentary elements so much I had to vent to my wife about how terrible the transgression was. It could have been a near-perfect novel if it weren’t for them. I did not enjoy the novel because of these parts, and I’m giving it a pity point just because I think it could have been so great without them.
If you want to have a message or statement spouted out by a narrator, make that narrator much heavier-handed earlier on. Better yet, make that statement a theme, and don’t bother stating it at all. Let the audience interpret your message in a way that is relevant to them. Remember this: If you make a statement, it might not age as well as you might like. If you draw a powerful story around an important theme, the message you want to send can become timeless.
Conclusion
A composite score of 22 won’t save The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store from Voidy. It has so many good qualities that I feel more upset about its failings than if it had just been a run-of-the-mill novel. It leaves me with broken dreams and halted pleasure. Goodbye, The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store.
Have at it, Voidy.
