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DEACON KING KONG
by James McBride ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 3, 2020
An exuberant comic opera set to the music of life.
The versatile and accomplished McBride ( Five Carat Soul , 2017, etc.) returns with a dark urban farce crowded with misjudged signals, crippling sorrows, and unexpected epiphanies.
It's September 1969, just after Apollo 11 and Woodstock. In a season of such events, it’s just as improbable that in front of 16 witnesses occupying the crowded plaza of a Brooklyn housing project one afternoon, a hobbling, dyspeptic, and boozy old church deacon named Cuffy Jasper "Sportcoat" Lambkin should pull out a .45-caliber Luger pistol and shoot off an ear belonging to the neighborhood’s most dangerous drug dealer. The 19-year-old victim’s name is Deems Clemens, and Sportcoat had coached him to be “the best baseball player the projects had ever seen” before he became “a poison-selling murderous meathead.” Everybody in the project presumes that Sportcoat is now destined to violently join his late wife, Hettie, in the great beyond. But all kinds of seemingly disconnected people keep getting in destiny's way, whether it’s Sportcoat’s friend Pork Sausage or Potts, a world-weary but scrupulous White policeman who’s hoping to find Sportcoat fast enough to protect him from not only Deems’ vengeance, but the malevolent designs of neighborhood kingpin Butch Moon. All their destines are somehow intertwined with those of Thomas “The Elephant” Elefante, a powerful but lonely Mafia don who’s got one eye trained on the chaos set off by the shooting and another on a mysterious quest set in motion by a stranger from his crime-boss father’s past. There are also an assortment of salsa musicians, a gentle Nation of Islam convert named Soup, and even a tribe of voracious red ants that somehow immigrated to the neighborhood from Colombia and hung around for generations, all of which seems like too much stuff for any one book to handle. But as he's already shown in The Good Lord Bird (2013), McBride has a flair for fashioning comedy whose buoyant outrageousness barely conceals both a steely command of big and small narrative elements and a river-deep supply of humane intelligence.
Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-7352-1672-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020
LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION
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PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
THE NIGHTINGALE
by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 3, 2015
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs : people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
HISTORICAL FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP
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by Kristin Hannah
BOOK TO SCREEN
by Robert Harris ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 22, 2016
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...
Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.
Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: he’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”
Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | LITERARY FICTION | RELIGIOUS FICTION | SUSPENSE | SUSPENSE
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The Old-Fashioned Warmth of James McBride
An affectionate novel about a housing project where residents hunt for buried treasure and a dope dealer refuses to sell to grandmothers..
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If ever a novel was out of step with the mood of its historical moment, it’s James McBride’s Deacon King Kong . The presiding spirit of the book is Christian, but not of the punitive, close-minded variety that commands the lion’s share of public attention. McBride’s novel is also resolutely untribal, with a dedication that reads “For God’s people—all of ‘em.” Even the antagonists in Deacon King Kong are not particularly vicious, not the cold-faced hitwoman whose reasons for double-crossing a drug lord seem solid enough, not even the dirty cops or the Italian mobsters grappling for a piece of the fledgling drug market at the Causeway Housing Projects in South Brooklyn in 1969, where the novel is set. When I read Junot Díaz’s review, for the New York Times, of Deacon King Kong , in which he insists that the novel is lit up with “clarifying rage,” I laughed; McBride’s has got to be the least angry book about a housing project I’ve ever read.
No doubt there are many (including myself, in times past) who consider an approach like McBride’s—one that focuses on the redemptive power of the bonds people form across divides of race, ethnicity, generations, and gender—sentimental and lacking in righteous indignation about structural injustice. But these days rage and indignation can be found in abundance pretty much everywhere you turn, earned and unearned, whether you want them or not. In such a climate, McBride’s affectionate, forgiving, hopeful humanism arrives like a balm, or—dare I say it?—a blessing.
Deacon King Kong is a comic novel, with most of its humor bubbling up from the small congregation of Five Ends Baptist Church, which operates out of a cinderblock building by the Brooklyn waterfront. The story’s inciting incident is a shooting: more whydunit than whodunit, since it takes place in broad daylight beside the flagpole, the central gathering place of the “Cause Houses.” A 71-year-old deacon shoots the ear off of 19-year-old Deems Clemens, “the most ruthless drug dealer the projects had ever seen.” The deacon, who goes by the nickname Sportcoat—other Cause Houses nicknames include Bum-Bum, Lightbulb, Soup, and Sportcoat’s best friend, Hot Sausage—not only can’t say why he did it, he doesn’t even remember doing it. Sportcoat’s fondness for the moonshine cooked up by the janitor in a nearby project, a concoction known as King Kong, has addled his memory, giving the alcoholic deacon his alternate nickname, and the novel its title.
A conflict between a preacher and a drug runner in a housing project may sound gritty, but Deems’ ruthlessness is not on an Avon Barksdale level. Not even close. Deems once attended Five Ends Church and even pitched for a Cause Houses baseball team, so he forbids his crew from occupying the prime real estate around the flagpole in the morning, out of respect for the elderly church members who hang out there until noon. He refuses to sell dope to grandmothers. He has no desire to wreak vengeance on Sportcoat and allows his supplier to send a henchman to rough the deacon up, so that Deems doesn’t have to do it himself.
It seems likely that McBride chose to set Deacon King Kong in 1969 because he wanted to depict a Brooklyn project on the verge of being taken over by drugs, before violence and addiction’s toll fully escalated. Another key character, Tommy Elefante, runs a goods-smuggling trade he inherited from his father out of a box car a block from the church. He’s a character right out of a Mario Puzo novel, a stoic, middle-aged Genovese with an icy temper who strives mightily to keep out of the drug business, as Don Corleone did. Otherwise, Deacon King Kong feels historically unmoored; not a single character mentions Vietnam or Martin Luther King Jr. None of the men appear to be veterans of any war.
Is this a weakness? Perhaps, but McBride doesn’t seem interested in writing historical fiction. Despite the urban setting, this is a village novel, like Emma or Barchester Towers, an ensemble piece about the way a small community of flawed characters who think they know one another all too well cope with newcomers and their own capacity for change. The plot features a lot of palaver about Deems’ scheme to switch suppliers and the gangster’s comically thwarted attempts to punish Sportcoat, who’s oblivious to the danger. True love flowers sweetly between two unlikely middle-aged couples. Characters seek not one but two buried treasures, even if one of them is just the church’s Christmas fund, hidden away by Sportcoat’s late wife, Hettie, in a place no one has been able to discern.
Deacon King Kong
by James McBride. Riverhead.
But the meat of McBride’s novel lies in Five Ends Church, in its scandals and feuds, its good deeds and fellowship, the aid its members offer one another in times of need, their sensational funerals. Early on, two of the choir’s best singers get into a spat over a microphone. “Church fights are normally hushed, hissy affairs,” McBride explains, “full of quiet backstabbing, intrigue, and whispered gossip about bad rice and beans. But this spat was public, the best kind.” The novel’s narrative voice emanates from the community itself, a patchwork of rumor and lore, with its taproot in midcentury black folk culture, in stories passed around until they become as much myth as history. Legend has it that once upon a time a 3-year-old Sportcoat barfed so vilely on a pastor that the man
announced, “He’s got the devil’s understanding,” and departed for Chicago, where he quit the gospel and became a blues singer named Tampa Red and recorded the monster hit song “Devil’s Understanding,” before dying in anonymity flat broke and crawling into history, immortalized in music studies and rock-and-roll college courses the world over, idolized by white writers and music intellectuals for his classic blues hit that was the bedrock of the $40 million Gospel Stam Music Publishing empire, from which neither he nor Sportcoat ever received a dime.
A lot of delight to be found in Deacon King Kong comes from its dialogue. “Why didn’t she lock it in the pastor’s office?” Sportcoat wonders to a friend about the missing Christmas fund. “What fool would keep money ’round a pastor?” the friend replies. Hot Sausage is forever telling Sportcoat, “Your cheese done slid off your cracker.” A running joke in the novel is that no one seems to know what deacons do. McBride’s love for this small-time, profoundly decent churchy milieu, with all its foibles, radiates from Deacon King Kong so powerfully you can almost feel the pages warm in your hands. It comes as no surprise, then, that McBride’s acknowledgments thank “the humble Redeemer who gives us the rain, the snow, and all things in between,” or to learn that his parents founded the New Brown Memorial Baptist Church in Red Hook, Brooklyn . The miracle is that even for those of us who have never visited such a place and most likely never will, he still makes it feel like home.
Fate and Fury in James McBride’s “Deacon King Kong”
Some novels about city life are poems of alienation, interior portraits of the existentially isolate, but James McBride’s vision of New York is one of overwhelming human profusion. His new novel, “ Deacon King Kong ” (Riverhead), set in what appears to be a fictionalized version of the Brooklyn housing project where McBride grew up, is crowded with characters whose backstories are crowded with more characters, all of their fates connected, in ways they know about and in ways they don’t. It’s a world where isolation seems like vanity; where one’s intimate business is usually, somehow, everyone else’s business, too; where even the attempted murder that begins the novel takes place in front of sixteen witnesses, many of whom know both shooter and victim personally.
“Deacon King Kong” is a nickname on top of a nickname: everyone in the Cause Houses knows the title character as Sportcoat. He is indeed a deacon, serving at the local Five Ends Baptist Church (though one of the novel’s running jokes is that no one quite knows what a deacon’s duties are, or how a man gets to be one), and he used to be the coach of the Cause’s youth baseball team. Now he spends his days doing the occasional odd job and, primarily, drinking. King Kong is the name of the home brew he favors. It is September, 1969, during what will prove a miraculous season for baseball fans in the city, and Sportcoat, seventy-one years of age, is equally in need of divine intervention, as he reels from the death of his wife.
Then one day, almost as if possessed, Sportcoat goes to the Cause Houses plaza, walks up to a teen-ager named Deems Clemens, a onetime star of Sportcoat’s youth baseball team who now sells heroin, and shoots him. Worse luck for Sportcoat, he succeeds only in taking off part of Deems’s ear, leaving the young man in enraging pain, and poised to exact revenge. It makes no sense to anyone who knows Sportcoat that the harmless old man would do such a thing. Afterward, Sportcoat has no memory of the shooting and expresses a kind of condescending skepticism toward those who try to convince him that he was responsible. The first two chapters both end by pronouncing Sportcoat “a dead man”; you could say that the novel is concerned not only with solving the mystery of his violent act but with his prospects for resurrection.
Meanwhile, a few blocks away, a mobster known as the Elephant, a holdover from back when the neighborhood was mostly Italian, gets a visit from a man known as the Governor, who purports to be an old friend of the Elephant’s late father. He’s come to collect something that the Elephant’s father was holding for him: a tiny, priceless bit of wartime plunder from Europe known as the Venus of Willendorf. No one has a clue where it is, apart from a cryptic old letter from Elephant père assuring the Governor that his treasure was safely “in the palm of God’s hand.”
These threads converge. Readers who understand that they are in a realm where everything makes sense, where nothing is mentioned at random—a plot, in other words—will figure out the Venus’ whereabouts well ahead of the characters. That’s O.K.; the satisfaction comes from seeing those characters, armed with less evidence than the reader possesses but guided by faith, close in on their goals, and from watching Sportcoat—whom a white character dismisses as the kind of drunk “who dies at twenty and is buried at eighty”—somehow get saved, over and over again.
The sheer volume of invention in “Deacon King Kong”—on the level of both character (the first chapter alone introduces twenty individuals by name) and language—commands awe. Reading it is like watching a movie in which one’s occasional impulse to ask questions is pleasantly swamped by the need to keep up with the pace of events. So comprehensive is the novel’s vision of the Cause Houses that Chapter 7 is narrated in part from the perspective of a colony of ants. In order to better understand these ants and how they came to the Cause, we flash back to the year 1951; by the time we return to 1969, the story of the ants has somehow roped in the New York Knicks, “that great Polish-Lithuanian General Andrew Thaddeus Bonaventure Kosciuszko,” and a stray German shepherd named Donald whose fur turned orange after it fell into the Gowanus Canal.
And the sentences! The prose radiates a kind of chain-reaction energy. After some chapters, you feel empathetically exhausted, in the way you might feel drained by watching an overtime football game. The experience of traversing a simple flashback paragraph is like trying to leap from stone to stone across a river, except occasionally one of them turns out to be not a stone after all but a lily pad, or a shadow, and into the river you go. Here’s a description of Sportcoat’s youth:
Bad luck seemed to follow the baby wherever he went. . . . At age three, when a young local pastor came by to bless the baby, the child barfed green matter all over the pastor’s clean white shirt. The pastor announced, “He’s got the devil’s understanding,” and departed for Chicago, where he quit the gospel and became a blues singer named Tampa Red and recorded the monster hit song “Devil’s Understanding,” before dying in anonymity flat broke and crawling into history, immortalized in music studies and rock-and-roll college courses the world over, idolized by white writers and music intellectuals for his classic blues hit that was the bedrock of the forty-million-dollar Gospel Stam Music Publishing empire, from which neither he nor Sportcoat ever received a dime.
A cynical reader might question the sunniness of McBride’s characterizations. The cops are bighearted, the mobsters are loyal. A character named Joaquin Cordero is introduced as “the only honest numbers runner in Cause Houses history.” Everyone’s better angels are generously foregrounded. And this angelic impulse extends to the action. Professional hit men are foiled in their attempts to kill the oblivious Sportcoat not once but three times, via accidental interventions that would have made Rube Goldberg blush. There are fortunate instances of mistaken identity, and other moments of plot-sustaining coincidence that may call to mind that classical contraption the deus ex machina.
But McBride has his eye less on the machina than on the deus. He begins the novel with a dedication to God, and he ends it with a second one. All his previous novels (most recently “ The Good Lord Bird ,” a recipient of the National Book Award, in 2013) have been works of historical fiction—about the Second World War, about the era of American slavery. A work of fiction set in 1969 might count as historical, too, and this one is related to a history he has written about before: his 1995 memoir, “ The Color of Water ,” was set in the Red Hook housing project, where he was raised. And yet McBride has described “Deacon King Kong” as a novel about a church, rather than about a housing project, and perhaps that spirit lends an element of parable to the plot’s occasional unlikelihoods, making them seem not sentimental or convenient but challenging. They dare you to accept things you can’t explain.
There is, though, another sound in “Deacon King Kong,” an undertone to all the humor and serendipity. A consciously suppressed anger emerges only rarely, but often enough to make you read the comedy differently. It’s as if any sentence in the book would, if allowed to flow all the way to its digressive end, empty into the pool of injustices that put these characters in the Cause Houses to begin with. When Sportcoat finally does remember the shooting, the revelation undams the kindly old deacon’s “absolute, indestructible rage,” in a way that casts the whole novel preceding it in a more complicated light. The fact that that light can be turned on and off is part of the complication.
And then there are those ants. Near the end of the exuberantly overdetailed ant flashback, you hit another one of those trick stones—a simple sentence that just keeps going, deeper and deeper, turning into an indictment that’s both tangential and not:
And there [the ants] stayed, a sole phenomenon in the Republic of Brooklyn, where cats hollered like people, dogs ate their own feces, aunties chain-smoked and died at age 102, a kid named Spike Lee saw God, the ghosts of the departed Dodgers soaked up all possibility of new hope, and penniless desperation ruled the life of the suckers too black or too poor to leave, while in Manhattan the buses ran on time, the lights never went out, the death of a single white child in a traffic accident was a page one story, while phony versions of black and Latino life ruled the Broadway roost, making white writers rich— West Side Story , Porgy & Bess , Purlie Victorious —and on it went, the whole business of the white man’s reality lumping together like a giant, lopsided snowball, the Great American Myth, the Big Apple, the Big Kahuna, the City That Never Sleeps, while the blacks and Latinos who cleaned the apartments and dragged out the trash and made the music and filled the jails with sorrow slept the sleep of the invisible and functioned as local color.
In 2016, President Obama awarded McBride the National Humanities Medal, for “humanizing the complexities of discussing race in America.” McBride’s belief that those maddening “complexities” make a kind of sense that we can’t always see appears to be unbroken in these less hopeful times. In “Deacon King Kong,” narrative omniscience leaves room for despair, as it must, but its over-all energy never flags. Sometimes the most affirmative thing you can do, as a storyteller, is to service that story’s momentum, in the hope that there’s some just reward for everyone in the end.
We associate tragedies with the operation of divine justice or divine will: hubristic human characters suffering the punishment of an angry god. But maybe it’s the comic plot—where all the clues are there if you read them right, where murderers’ hands are improbably stayed, where a “dead man” is given a new life—that more closely expresses belief. A comedy, no matter how frenetic on the surface, is an engine of patience, of faith in the idea that lost things will eventually be found. ♦
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