The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store
Today I found myself perusing a Reddit thread about learning to weave, which…YOLO! (Yes, I have a weird desire to learn to weave. Weave what? Idk. But I loved bringing home a loom from Blue Birds when I was a kid, and for several months I’ve been wanting to learn a hands-on hobby to tap into a different part of the creative brain.)
The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, James McBride’s latest, blasted onto the scene about the same time that I was mulling over this whole hobby thing. I find McBride’s narrative style sort of scattershot and tenuous, like a wobbly stool that nonetheless keeps you upright. (Or, hey, how about a ball of yarn that may start to unravel and/or has a few loose bumps but still works for the intended purpose?) It teeters riiiight on the edge of chaotic (so many characters!), but he keeps snapping it back. The novel is engrossing; reading this story of a Jewish and Black community in Pottstown, PA in the first half of the 20th century feels like listening to an old-timey storyteller. It’s loose and flowing and the exact opposite of neat and tidy. (In fact, McBride is a jazz musician, and btw, Deacon King Kong felt the same way for me too.)
McBride shines with dialogue — and he also repeats plot points and character traits in a seeming loop. One might be tricked into thinking that he simply got sloppy — like, hello, you already wrote that thing about Doc Roberts at the parade. But when we repeat something, we’re underscoring its importance. And the repeating sometimes materializes because this communication isn’t being received — there’s a disconnect, a lost-in-translation moment between different communities. (Or: some just refuse to listen.) Toward the end of the book, a special communication pattern emerges between two boys who have been silenced in every way, which made me realize that even though I sometimes struggled to organize all the disparate threads of The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, I still understood it. I was willing to sit and absorb. That’s communication that bridges instead of divides…you know, weaving something loose into something not just manageable, but revelatory.
(Everyone’s getting bookmarks for Xmas!)
originally published on instagram