I have known for years of James McBride’s reputation as a masterful storyteller, but only recently did I encounter his talents first-hand with my reading of The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store. What an astonishing novel! Imagine if Elmore Leonard came up with the idea for a caper and asked Michael Chabon and Toni Morrison to collaborate on the manuscript. That’s not fair, actually, because James McBride came up with this profoundly satisfying work all on his own. If I’m going to invoke the names of other writers, I should cite William Faulkner, whose Light in August gives us a comic plot with Lena Grove, a tragic plot with Joe Christmas, and a melodramatic plot with Gail Hightower. McBride quite skillfully assembles a cast of Jewish characters, represented initially by the hapless and good-hearted Moshe Ludlow and his wife Chona; African-American characters, who slip into the narrative in cameo roles only to become full-blown protagonists, particularly Nate Love and his wife Addie; and White characters, who are mostly awful to the others but who get their share of humanity, too. We get a comedic love story that turns tragic with Moshe and Chona; a tragic love story that ends happily with Nate and Addie; and a melodrama complete with secret tunnels, an evil sexual predator, and the daring rescue of a deaf boy from a horrific madhouse. I dare anybody to put this book down once you start to read.
What’s especially impressive about McBride’s accomplishment is that in a prologue—which I reread after I’d finished the book—he pulls a Citizen Kane on us and, just as Herman Mankiewicz and Orson Welles do with their opening newsreel at the start of their celebrated movie—tells us everything that’s going to happen in the next couple of hundred pages. His summary is so swift, however, and our familiarity with the characters so minimal, that we don’t register all the spoilers he has provided. He even gives us a Rosebud: there’s a body discovered in the shaft of an old well from decades before, and found with it is a mezuzah. We have to wait until the end to find out whose body it is, and when we do, we are very, very happy. McBride renders to us a teeming universe within the confines of Pottstown, Pennsylvania, and he even uses the historical flood of 1972 as a Biblical analogue to wash everything clean. In a coda he lovingly, ironically, and delightfully sends his surviving African-American characters to paradise in—surprise!—the American South. James McBride has a heart and a wicked sense of humor, and he has earned all the kudos he has received.
And now for something completely different: We’ve Got to Try, the new book by Beto O’Rourke. This nonfiction social history provides a meticulous survey of voter suppression in the United States. You will read it with interest for the specific examples O’Rourke uses to illustrate how pernicious and dangerous voter suppression has been and threatens to become again, and you will finish it with outrage and a compulsion to help resist some lawmakers’ increasing efforts to keep certain groups away from the ballot box. The book is dedicated to Lawrence Nixon, a courageous African-American doctor in Texas who tried for twenty years before he finally succeeded in winning the right to vote. It’s Nixon who gives the book its title. Told by two White officials that they could not allow him to vote, he replied, “I know you can’t. But I’ve got to try.”
Woodberry Forest School has produced lots of good writers since its founding in 1889, including the lyricist and composer Johnny Mercer, and I wouldn’t dare try to list all of them. But I got to know several writers-in-the-making when I worked there between 1982 and 2020. John Hart has enjoyed smashing success as a writer of mystery thrillers, one of which, The Last Child, we used as a school-wide summer reading selection. Logan Ward has written a fine memoir (See You in a Hundred Years, which we read in one of my senior English classes). We also read Chris Swann’s excellent debut novel, Shadow of the Lions, which was set in a school that resembled Woodberry more than a little. I’m ashamed that I didn’t find time to give class attention to John Copenhaver’s sensational Dodging and Burning, his first novel, which won the Macavity Award in 2019. (Sorry, John, but I was already thinking about retirement, and sorry, too, to Michael Craven, who has been publishing well-received mysteries since 2009.) And, after collaborating with a colleague on a book about the war on drugs, Beto O’Rourke has joined this fine company and has published his first book written all on his own. I’ve mentioned just a few of the published ones; Chris Lindsey, for example, has written an excellent novel that deserves an ISBN and a place on the bookstore shelves. The Woodberry Forest writers are too eclectic to form an official movement, like Robert Penn Warren and Allen Tate with the Fugitives, but they are making their mark, and I am pleased to salute them here..