Heavenly Earth

Acadia National Park, Maine

There isn’t a lot to say about The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store that has not been said. Published in 2023, the book belongs to the over-one-million-copies-sold club, boasts various prizes and awards, and is still prominently on display in the window of my local Barnes & Noble. Much has been written and said about the book, and it has been showered with deserved praise. It is a good book, notable for its strong characters, intricate plot, and satisfying ending.

The author, James McBride, occasionally steps away from the story for a page or so to offer an indictment of something, typically white Protestants or white American attitudes towards immigrants. These asides work within the plot, and I guess the author wanted to make sure readers didn’t get so caught up in the story they missed the point it was meant to illustrate. Greater minds than mine can debate whether they were necessary. The asides were generally unexceptional, but one grabbed my attention.

In Chapter Eighteen, one of the main characters, a woman named Chona, dies in a hospital. McBride constructed a beautiful scene of the few minutes before she passes, which takes place in Chona’s mind. The scene lays out the wisdom Chona receives in those last moments of life about what matters, how the joy of being alive is more important than grievances and complaints. This is combined with a scathing indictment of American culture, specifically how technology shapes it, and a prediction as to how that particular story will end. McBride’s language on the subject knocked me in the head, particularly his reference to the smart phone as “a device that fed them their oppression disguised as free thought.” In that one phrase, McBride encapsulates a viewpoint of the dangers of technology, the corporate leaders who, with the help of both major political parties, profit enormously from that technology while waving away the harm it causes, and the clever way it is marketed to the American population as the very opposite of what it really is. The way I read it was that McBride was referring to the libido sciendi, love of knowing, the drive to understand the world around us. This drive is so fundamentally part of being human that the only way to suppress it is by narcotizing it into submission with something like the smart phone, which technology companies seem to have done with phenomenal success. You can agree or disagree with the viewpoint. I am not defending an opinion, mostly because I am too busy marveling at how McBride says so much with so few words.