If you think this novel is beginning to sound too nice, too pat, you don't know McBride's writing. He crowds the chaos of the world into his sentences ... McBride's roving narrator is, by turns, astute, withering, giddy, damning and jubilant. He has a fine appreciation for the human comedy ... McBride looks squarely at savage truths about race and prejudice, but he also insists on humor and hope. The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store is one of the best novels I've read this year. It pulls off the singular magic trick of being simultaneously flattening and uplifting.
Confirms the abiding strength of McBride’s vernacular narrative. With his eccentric, larger-than-life characters and outrageous scenes of spliced tragedy and comedy, “Dickensian” is not too grand a description for his novels, but the term is ultimately too condescending and too Anglican. The melodrama that McBride spins is wholly his own ... If there’s a ramshackle quality to McBride’s plotting, it’s the artful precariousness of a genius. His expansive collection of ominous, preposterous and saintly characters twirls like loose sticks in a river, guided by a physics of chaos beyond all calculation except awe ... We all need — we all deserve — this vibrant, love-affirming novel that bounds over any difference that claims to separate us.
Moves with the precision, magnitude and necessary messiness of some of Gego’s most inspired structures ... The book is a murder mystery locked inside a Great American Novel ... McBride takes his time unfurling the story from there, introducing more and more Chicken Hill residents in the novel’s first third, which might leave some readers feeling as though the plot stalls before it even starts ... His style here won’t please readers who want the author to cut to the chase, and I’ll admit that early on I felt annoyed when yet another new character would take center stage instead of the novel getting on with this business of who did what, how come and what’s going to happen to Dodo? But McBride’s story is not to be rushed ... A charming, smart, heart-blistering and heart-healing novel. Great love bursts through these pages.
Lives up to expectations, delivering an entertaining, meaningful story about the community formed when people take advantage of America's opportunities for cross-cultural connection ... McBride writes in an appealing, omniscient voice, introducing a host of memorable characters. The novel blooms into a new story each time a different character assumes the focus ... Unflinching in its portrayal of America's treatment of Black and Jewish citizens ... Cohesive, satisfying, hopeful.
Classic McBride: He doesn’t shy away from bold statements about the national catastrophes of race and xenophobia, and he always gives us a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down. The sugar is McBride’s spitfire dialogue and murder-mystery-worthy plot machinations; his characters’ big personalities and bigger storylines; his wisecracking, fast-talking humor; and prose so agile and exuberant that reading him is like being at a jazz jam session ... Though the Dodo storyline risks being a bit on the nose, deft characterization and unexpected tonal variations help complicate the reader’s perspective and add nuance and depth. No villain escapes McBride’s humor ... In McBride’s work, digging deep into the tangled roots of complicated communities is the antidote to misplaced blame and false history.
...the novel has a lot more to offer than all of that 'who-shot-John nonsense'—which is a good enough premise for luring the reader into McBride’s rich, carefully drawn portrait of a Depression-era community of African Americans and Jewish immigrants as they live, love, fight, and, of course, work, in a small Midwestern town ... It’s a testament to McBride’s masterful storytelling that, by the end of the book, all that 'who-shot-John nonsense' with the skeleton down the well hardly matters anymore. By this point, the well is more meaningful for what it symbolizes — a crossroads of heaven, earth, and the underworld, and the way each person must direct his fate by plumbing his own depths.
McBride effortlessly transports us to another time and place. A musician as well as a writer, he is clearly at home in this period and milieu – his father was African American, his mother a Jewish immigrant from Poland. Every member of his diverse cast earns their place in this epic tale. McBride’s plotting is intricate but deftly handled, his rich characterisation and attention to detail are impressive, his compassion exemplary ... Glorious.
An endearing, eloquent, exuberant, frequently humorous and consistently engaging 381 pages. The novel is at once a thriller, a cultural history, a love story and an ensemble comedy with a Dickensian cast of characters, all made unforgettable by James McBride’s swinging prose and uncanny knack for blending social realism and nimble storytelling ... A terrifically entertaining read.
[A] better contenders for the 21st-century GAN than many other, more vaunted specimens that have gone before. It’s precisely the qualities that might prompt critics to view these novels as “small” that, paradoxically, make them so big. They are comic novels, ensemble pieces. They lack obvious heroic action. Their focus is intimate rather than sweeping. But in the words of Walt Whitman (an American writer McBride often brings to mind), they contain multitudes.
Exuberant ... Even minor characters are richly imagined, and McBride's descriptions are marvels of concision ... McBride has found the perfect vehicle for dramatizing conflicts among Jewish, Black, and white Christian communities in this lively novel.
Funny, tender, knockabout, gritty, and suspenseful, McBride’s microcosmic, socially critiquing, and empathic novel dynamically celebrates difference, kindness, ingenuity, and the force that compels us to move heaven and earth to help each other.
This new novel by James McBride should be read from cover to cover because the 'Acknowledgments' section at the end is as emotionally moving as the novel itself ... The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store tackles angry issues that continue to roil America today with a fierceness leavened with McBride’s humor and attractive characters.
Humane can often employ the melodramatic, and the Dodo plot might be if it were not the backside of McBride’s patchwork quilt of characters, some comic, some eccentric, some just plotlessly living along as they see fit ... The Jews in The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store just don’t have the music of counter-punching orality that the jazz musician McBride most loves to write ... Every so often McBride’s 21st century voice breaks through the voices of his characters and makes fairly obvious generalizations about the effects of racism and religious prejudice, conclusions that would not be news to his 1930s characters or his contemporary readers. The authorial interventions unfortunately imply that representation of a variegated group struggling to be humane is not sufficient. In McBride’s National Book Award-winning Good Lord Bird, he had John Brown to do the lecturing ... When I interviewed Toni Morrison many decades ago, she said she wanted to write “village literature, fiction that is for the village, for the tribe,” novels that could be read and understood by the Black characters within the books, readers without high-level educations. She had difficulty hewing to this ideal. Though I haven’t read all of McBride’s work, I think Deacon King Kong and The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store are what Morrison had in mind.
A vibrant tale ... McBride’s pages burst with life ... This endlessly rich saga highlights the different ways in which people look out for one another.
Another boisterous hymn to community, mercy, and karmic justice ... The interlocking destinies of these and other characters make for tense, absorbing drama and, at times, warm, humane comedy. McBride’s well-established skill with narrative tactics may sometimes spill toward the melodramatic here. But as in McBride’s previous works, you barely notice such relatively minor contrivances because of the depth of characterizations and the pitch-perfect dialogue of his Black and Jewish characters ... If it’s possible for America to have a poet laureate, why can’t James McBride be its storyteller-in-chief?
