Point of View

McBride deploys a shifting third-person perspective throughout the novel which grants a certain amount of interiority to the novel's characters but primarily occupies an oracular and omniscient space within the narrative. Given that the cast is made up of a mosaic of characters, McBride's decision not to attach the perspective to one character in particular allows him to celebrate and explore the diversity and multiplicity within Chicken Hill that the novel so reveres as an ideal for communal life. Furthermore, the decision to use an omniscient, or all-knowing, narrator allows McBride to toggle between various historical periods and even infuse aspects of the novel with direct discourse so as to communicate authorial perspective in the midst of a fictional narrative.

The community of Chicken Hill, the central setting of The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, is noted throughout the novel as a kind of hodgepodge of...