On James McBride’s “The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store”

The final 1/3 of The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store is a really good book, but the first 2/3 might be one of my favorite books I’ve read in ages. James McBride can spin a yarn: There’s enough plot and characters in here for a good dozen novels, but they seem to come so easily to him that he doesn’t need to hoard them. It’s 1936, and in the early parts of the book we meet just about everyone in the titular grocery store’s neighborhood (and then some), and even minor characters receive introductions that span years and parentage — the erstwhile parents with their own lively, richly described histories — all within a few paragraphs. Take Bernice Davis, for example, who lives next door to Heaven & Earth and is the estranged best friend of its proprietress, Chona Ludlow:

“She was second cousin to Earl ‘Shug’ Davis, driver for the vice president of Pottstown Bank; second cousin to Bobby Davis, who once worked as an all-around handyman for Buck Weaver, the great Pottstown baseball player who played for the Chicago White Sox; and also, by dint of a twisted, convoluted intermarriage between her grandfather and his son’s stepdaughter, was great-aunt to Mrs. Traffina Davis, the wife of Reverend Sturgess, meaning Bernice was actually twelve years younger than her great-niece. She also served as stepsister to Rusty Davis, the handyman who fixed everything; fourth cousin to Hollis Davis, the Hill’s only locksmith; and polished it off by being niece to Chulo Davis, the legendary jazz drummer who left Chicken Hill to play with the famous Harlem Hamfats in Chicago before he was shot dead over a bowl of butter beans.”

And that’s him just warming up. You get the idea someone could say “tell us a story” at the dinner table, and he’d improvise an entire novel on the spot. In drawing them so vividly, he creates characters you genuinely care about, and while occasionally heart-wrenching, it’s also an incredibly funny book. I was going back and forth between reading and listening — it makes a great audiobook — and so could often be seen walking around my neighborhood by myself in recent days, earbuds buried under my beanie and puffer hood, laughing out loud.

The book is set in the poor, tight-knit, Black and Jewish neighborhood of Chicken Hill, in otherwise WASPy Pottstown PA. It opens with a flash forward to 1972, wherein we’re told a body has been found in a well, setting up a mystery and an eventual reveal. But who winds up dead in the well isn’t ultimately all that important in the grand scheme of the book, so as the narrative builds toward its big dual-track action scenes (leaving some of the main characters and the grocery store behind), it ironically loses some steam. But that’s faint criticism for a fantastic book.

So I was sad when it ended, I’ll miss the characters, and I’m eager to read more McBride. It’s rare for me to have read so much fiction – and especially so much new fiction — in the span of a few months, but as with Sigrid Nunez, McBride is a writer I’ve been wanting to read for years, and I jumped right on their latest. Like Nunez, McBride has left me happily wanting more.

(Coincidentally, today is Heaven & Earth’s Round 1 match in the Tournament of Books; I’m eager to see what the judge has to say!)

[ IMAGE: Photo of The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store among other books ]