It may not be real, but it could be

How do novelists convince readers that their lies are true?

This important it seems to me when they want readers to believe their characters could be real people and the book's events could actually have happened.

One way to add verisimilitude ("the appearance of being true or real") is to set the action in a real place at a certain time and include historic events and figures. For example I set a novel in a low-income housing project at the corner if 125th and Amsterdam in the early 1960s and includes Malcolm X.

James McBride's wonderful The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store is set in the fictional Pottstown, but which could be one of a number of small towns in western Pennsylvania not far from Reading. (Interestingly, there is a Pottsville, PA, in the area.) The time is identified as 1936. The Klu Klux Klan is active. The news from Europe is worrisome for Pottstown's handful of Jewish residents—handful because after a dozen Jewish families had immigrated the city fathers decided that was plenty and actively discouraged any more.

As the jacket describes, in 1972, when workers in Pottstown were digging the foundations for a new development, they found a skeleton at the bottom of a well. Who the skeleton was and how it got there were two of the long-held secrets kept by the residents of Chicken Hill, the dilapidated neighborhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side and shared ambitions and sorrows—not exactly true (a common jacket copy failing). The residents did not know how it got there although we readers do.

Chicken Hill was the unpaved, unsewered area where Moshe and Chona Ludlow lived when Moshe integrated his theater in town and where Chona ran the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store. When the state came looking for a deaf boy to institutionalize him, Chona and Nate Timblin, the Black janitor at Moshe’s theater and the unofficial leader of the Chicken Hill Black community worked together to keep the boy safe. That does not go well however, and raises the book's tension.

McBride is brilliantly able to overlap and deepen these characters’ stories. He evokes the ways the people who live on the margins of white, Christian America struggle and what they do to survive. I found it interesting that a theme running under the obvious story and events is the prejudice that Blacks and Jews must live with in America. Although a major and endearing character dies in the novel, which surprised me, the book concludes satisfactorily and plausibly. As the publisher says, "McBride shows us that even in dark times, it is love and community—heaven and earth—that sustain us."