“A 1972 skeleton found at the bottom of a Pottstown, Pennsylvania well sends the novel back to a 1930s neighborhood where Black, Jewish, and immigrant families lived alongside each other.”
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The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store is James McBride's 2023 novel, the Kirkus Prize winner and Oprah's Book Club pick that quickly became one of the most-talked-about American novels of its year. The narrative frame is a 1972 demolition project in Pottstown, Pennsylvania that uncovers a skeleton at the bottom of an old well. The body of the novel is the story of Chicken Hill, the 1920s and 1930s Pottstown neighborhood where Black, Jewish, and Eastern European immigrant families lived alongside each other, where Moshe and Chona Ludlow ran the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, and where the events that led to the skeleton in the well took place.
McBride's prose is some of the most generous in contemporary American fiction. The Chicken Hill setting is rendered as a fully realized neighborhood with the kind of attention to specific small-business operations (the dance hall Moshe runs, the deli the Goldstein family keeps, the icehouse) that most contemporary literary fiction would treat as background scenery. The Chona Ludlow character (Moshe's wife, a left-handed Lithuanian Jewish immigrant who became the moral center of Chicken Hill before her early death) is one of the most carefully drawn protagonists in McBride's catalog. The 1972 framing payoff in the final fifth lands the way McBride's plot constructions usually do: as the resolution of a moral question the novel has been quietly asking all along.
Recommended as required 2023 American literary fiction reading, as the right McBride entry point if you have not read him before, and as the canonical contemporary novel about American Black-Jewish neighborhood history. Read The Good Lord Bird next (the 2013 National Book Award winner). Five stars without reservation. Dominic Hoffman's audiobook is excellent.
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