Sunday Books & Culture: Heaven and Earth

This week’s reviews include National Book Award winner James McBride’s “The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store” and young adult historical fiction by Rodman Philbrick and Elizabeth Wein.

THE HEAVEN AND EARTH GROCERY STORE 

by James McBride

Published by Riverhead Books (August 8, 2023)
Hardcover $16.99
Audiobook $12.99

Reviewed by Drew Gallagher

If you read nothing else in 2024, you need to read the following passage from James McBride’s astounding The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store. Please understand that I am on a word limit and sharing this passage will reduce my ability to heap praise on his novel, but when given an opportunity to share greatness, I must humbly step aside. The passage is about a Memorial Day Parade set in 1930’s Pottstown, Pennsylvania, as the town celebrated its favorite son and free beer: 

“It was a nod to history, a sentimental bid to the great John Antes, Pottstown’s greatest composer. Nobody outside Pottstown had ever heard of Antes, of course, in part because he wrote trumpet sonatas that nobody played, and in part because the John Antes Historical Society’s Cornet Marching Band, which was composed of forty-five souls—numbskulls, pig farmers, heavy smokers, bums, drunks, cheerleaders, tomboys, bored college students, and any other white American in Montgomery County who could purse their lips tight enough to blast a noise through a trumpet—sounded like a cross between a crank engine trying to start on a cold October morning and a dying African silverback gorilla howling out its last. It was all a nod to Antes, the great composer, husband, father, revolutionary, statesman, plunderer, iron maker, wife beater, cornetist, Indian grave robber, and all-around great American who served as president of Pottstown borough and as a colonel under the great George Washington himself—and still found time to write marching band sonatas for trumpet, imagine that. After the daylong party and parade celebrating his life wound its way back to the Antes House, more speeches were delivered, followed by a giant outdoor pig roast party, followed by fireworks blasted into the night, at which time everyone got drunk and forgot all about old John.”

Many have forgotten John Antes, but I won’t soon forget the magic of the above passage. (In what I can only describe as a colossal failure of my parents and my upbringing, I never knew of the great John Antes even though I was born and raised a mere 20 miles from one of the world’s greatest composers of trumpet sonatas for marching bands. Instead of trekking to the Coventry Mall, I should have been making pilgrimages to the John Antes house.)

The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store begins slyly as a number of character sketches with little hint of a plot thread. In McBride’s writing, this would have certainly been enough. The combination of Jewish lives and Black lives lived atop Chicken Hill in Pottstown’s poor district are entertaining in their breadth. (Again, why was I not hiking up Chicken Hill as a child?) Then, ingeniously, as genius writers are wont to do, McBride starts to bring these character threads together, and the lives intersect in subtle and then glorious ways. Ultimately, one of the most sympathetic and innocent of characters, a Black deaf boy named Dodo, is thrust into the troubled history of Chicken Hill and more broadly into the troubled history of the United States in the 1930’s north.

At novel’s end, there is a touching deathbed scene where a character’s final words are profound in their simplicity and in the memory it stirs: “Thank you, Monkey Pants.” It could have ended no better or other way. Thank you, James McBride.

Drew Gallagher is a freelance writer residing in Fredericksburg, Virginia. He is the second-most-prolific book reviewer and first video book reviewer in the 136-year history of the Free Lance-Star Newspaper. While being the first “humorist” at FXBG Advance, he still aspires to be the second-most-prolific book reviewer in the history of FXBG Advance.

TWO NOVELS FOR MIDDLE SCHOOLERS