The heaven and earth grocery store (by James McBride)

(Amazon UK link)

I had never heard of James McBride. Most likely I would never have picked up his novel ‘The heaven and earth grocery store’. But it was allocated for this month’s book club, so I bought it second-hand when I was in the UK last year. I had no idea what to expect when I started it a few days ago. The cover (and, indeed, the title) imply something light-hearted, perhaps amusing in places. That's quite misleading, as I quickly discovered. 

Nor was I enlightened about the story in the first few chapters. The book opens with a prologue in italics, mentioning some excavations, and the discovery of a skeleton at the bottom of the well. An elderly Jewish man is going to be questioned. But then there’s a huge hurricane that destroys everything in its path. When it’s over, the old man has vanished, as has the evidence. 

It’s written in a strange style, as if told by someone in dialect. And since the back cover of the book mentions a murder mystery, I assumed that the next chapter, which goes back nearly fifty years, would have some clues, red herrings, and other features that are common on crime fiction of this kind. 

However I was wrong. The next few chapters, I thought, were very heavy-going. They introduce a slew of different characters in the 1930s, some of them Jewish (mostly from Eastern European countries) and some of them black Africans. They’re all in the United States in a period where racism is rife. Although they’re in a Northern State where there is supposedly equality, that’s clearly not the case. Most of the black families live in one neighbourhood, and the only white people who care about them are the Jewish couple Moshe and Chona. 

Moshe runs a dance hall, and there’s a lengthy section about his mistakes in marketing, his decision to introduce black bands, and various other issues that went rather over my head. He has a cousin who bales him out and advises him. His wife runs a grocery store which loses money because she gives credit to everyone who can’t afford to pay.  

And then there are more and more people who are mentioned, most of them with lengthy back stories written in long, rambling sentences which I had to re-read to make sense of. At least, I did at first; I soon realised I could skim without actually losing anything. It’s not that it’s bad writing: the author paints good word pictures, and I think it’s probably valuable social history to learn about ordinary people in this very different society. But I found the number of cast members very confusing, with no idea which ones were going to be significant.

More importantly, I didn’t much like anyone other than Chona, and she spends most of the book being ill. She had polio as a child, and walks with a limp, but she also has fainting spells and seizures, and it’s not clear what’s wrong with her. 

There’s a black couple who work for Moshe, called Nate and Addie, who take in a 12-year-old nephew after his mother dies. This boy, known as Dodo, turns out to be one of the most important characters in the book. He’s deaf, due to a horrific accident three years earlier, and has learned to play dumb because he doesn’t want to get into trouble. He doesn’t go to school because of his lack of hearing, and the authorities want to put him in a special school - really an institution for the mentally ill. 

There’s also a thread about water supplies and reservoirs and illegal pipes, which I struggled to make sense of - I don’t think it matters much. The plot related to Dodo is more interesting, but also very disturbing; I knew some mental asylums were harsh, cruel places but had no idea something as horrific as this existed less than 100 years ago. For although this is fiction, the author evidently bases the communities and the places in real historical context. 

I did find the latter half of the book more readable than the first half; but it still felt quite long-winded, with a lot of extraneous detail that didn’t seem to go anywhere, or have any relevance to the story. Some readers loved this book; I felt it could have done with significant editing. 

As for the supposed 'murder mystery', that's not mentioned at all. There are no clues or hints of any kind, until it becomes clear what happened in the last chapters. There's no 'mystery'. And there's another brief italicised section at the end, summarising what happened to a few of the characters. 

On the whole I’m glad that I read this book. Part of the reason for the local reading group is to encourage people to move beyond their preferred genres, and I appreciate that. I think I learned a fair amount about the culture and the era, through this book, even though I didn't really enjoy it, and it’s not one I’m ever likely to read again. 

Still, don't necessarily take my word for it. This book has become a best-seller, and was chosen for at least one 'book of the month' award. A lot of reviewers love it. It just isn't my kind of book. 

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