Everyone knows that you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but something I would do well to remind myself is not to get too excited and judge a book by its first few chapters. Forty or so pages into James McBride’s new novel, The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, I was sure I was reading a future favorite, and possibly a real classic. Lamentably, the awe-inspiring magic of those early pages does not persist, as McBride’s ambitious scope leads to the plot losing momentum and his huge cast of characters leaves the story without the kind of fully-realized characters who can truly carry a great novel.
The titular store is located in a neighborhood known as Chicken Hill within the city of Pottstown, PA. In the book’s 1930s setting Chicken Hill is split between immigrant Jews, many of whom are striving establish themselves and to assimilate into White America, and a Black community mostly comprised of families who have moved up from the South to find work. The two communities have little in common and tensions sometimes arise, but they seldom bubble over. One big reason is the operator of Heaven and Earth, Chona Ludlow, a genuinely kind person who insists on keeping the store open and extending credit to her struggling neighbors long after her theater-operator husband Moshe has achieved the kind of success that would allow them to leave the neighborhood for greener pastures.
Chona is a character with a lot of potential, but McBride is content to let us see her only through the eyes of others. Her husband worships her. The town’s racist Doc Roberts covets her even though it disgusts him to do so. Chona’s employee, Addie, and her husband Nate appreciate Chona’s good nature even as they know it changes little about their status in town overall. Addie and Nate are the novel’s other central focus, as the town’s Black residents seek out their counsel on all sorts of issues.
The novel’s central event involves Nate and Addie’s nephew Dodo, a young boy rendered deaf by the household accident that killed his mother. The state wants to take Dodo away to an institution, so Addie begs Chona to help hide the boy. The ramifications of that decision impact the whole Chicken Hill community in far-ranging and deadly ways.
McBride’s goal seems to be establishing the world of Chicken Hill by building up many of its inhabitants. The novel’s point of view shifts frequently, and new characters are introduced practically right up to the book’s conclusion. These character introductions are regretfully similar in tone and structure. McBride is a fan of the “telling anecdote.” He’ll bring a new character into the story by describing some crazy story from his or her past. He’s also a little too in love with nicknames for my taste, as indicated by characters named Big Soap, Fatty, Paper, Dodo, and Monkey Pants.
But this approach, especially in a novel of less than 400 pages, leaves little room for the story to breathe. McBride frequently brings the reader right up to the point of a major event only to shift to a new character’s perspective. By the time we come back to the original character, the event is in the past and we’re on to something else. The plot is therefore fractured and its impact is lessened.
Reviews for the novel are almost uniformly positive, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it ended up contending for or even winning awards. On a sentence level, McBride writes fabulous prose, and there will be plenty of readers who appreciate his kaleidoscopic look at a town in crisis. But I must admit that my heightened expectations were not met, and thus I found The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store a disappointment.