THE HEAVEN & EARTH GROCERY STOREby James McBride
A few weeks ago, at the same time I was doing this review, I visited the Guggenheim with my girlfriend. The exhibition shown as we walked the museum’s famous spiral was “Measuring Infinity,” a wonderful retrospective of the work of the great Venezuelan artist Gego. A German Jew who fled Nazi persecution in Europe, Gego arrived in Venezuela in 1939 and became one of the most important artists to emerge from Latin America in the 20th century. His work speaks to a deep curiosity about the interconnectedness of shapes, objects and dimensions created by those relationships.
Perhaps it’s his fascination with structure and connection (which to me screams community), or maybe I was in awe as I stood in the middle of Gego’s wire galaxy of lines and points, but whatever it was, something prompted me to turn to my lover and say, “The book I’m reading is just like this. .” To which he replied, “Well, it must also be incredible.” And he was absolutely right. “The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store,” the latest novel from bestselling, National Book Award-winning author James McBride, moves with precision, scale and necessary excitement some of the world’s most inspired structures. Gego.
The book is a murder mystery locked inside a Great American Novel. The story opens in 1972, with the discovery of a skeleton buried in a well in Pottstown, Pa. The identity of the body is unknown but several clues found (a belt buckle, a pendant and a mezuzah) led the authorities to question the only Jew left from the town’s once vibrant Jewish community. However, instead of a simple whodunit, the novel leaves the bones behind and returns to the 1920s and ’30s, to Chicken Hill, the neighborhood in Pottstown where Jews, Blacks and immigrants make their home It’s a community of people held together by bonds of love and duty, and it’s here that McBride’s epic story truly begins.
We first meet Moshe Ludlow, a Romanian Jew who owns a local theater and dance hall, and his wife, Chona, a stubborn, strong-hearted American-born Jew who runs a grocery store where named the book. The grocery store costs Moshe and Chona more money than it makes because Chona allows many of Chicken Hill’s Black and European immigrant residents to take out lines of credit that he never asks them to repay. . As the story begins, we watch Moshe and Chona observe their ever-changing community from their respective posts: Moshe watches through his theater and an increasingly ill Chona watches from the store.
