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Fast, complex and funny, 'deacon king kong' is a love letter to new york city.

Gabino Iglesias

Deacon King Kong

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James McBride's Deacon King Kong is a feverish love letter to New York City, people, and writing. The prose is relentless and McBride's storytelling skills shine as he drags readers at breakneck speed trough a plethora of lives, times, events, and conversations. The novel is 370 pages, but McBride has packed enough in there for a dozen novellas, and reading them all mashed together is a pleasure.

The year is 1969, and Sportcoat is the hard-drinking deacon of an old church in the Cause Houses projects in south Brooklyn. Sportcoat, also known as Deacon Cuffy, lost his wife a while ago, and his life has been on a downward spiral since. He argues with her ghost almost constantly and is obsessed with the money from the Christmas Club, which was in a secret place she didn't tell anyone about before dying. One day, drunk and angry, Sportcoat saunters into the Cause Houses courtyard, takes a rusty .38 from his pocket, and shoots Deems, the project's chief drug dealer — right in front of everybody. Deems dodges at the last second and the bullet merely rips his ear off, but the consequences of Sportcoat's actions go above and beyond a damaged ear and a trip to the hospital.

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Deacon King Kong is fast, deep, complex, and hilarious. McBride's prose is shimmering and moving, a living thing that has its own rhythm, pulls you in from the first page and never lets go. His story focuses on the people that make the Big Apple what it is: the strange, the poor, the insane, the mobsters. He also showcases the city's wonderful diversity, filling his pages with Puerto Ricans, African Americans, Italians, and Irish folks.

And all these many people get a turn in the spotlight. Sportcoat is at the center of everything, but folks from church and the projects, small time crooks, bodega owners, mobsters, and cops all get space on the page, and they all earn it. McBride has a talent for writing about big ensembles, and here even the city and its animals are important players. For example, there's a brilliant chapter about the way red killer ants made their way to New York City and became part of the Cause Houses projects:

... a sole phenomenon in the Republic of Brooklyn, where cats hollered like people, dogs eat 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 lives 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 sorrows slept the sleep of the invisible and functioned as local color.

Lastly there is Sportcoat himself, a man who's a living myth, an impossible amalgamation of stories that make him seem otherworldly, maybe even immortal. When he was a child and his back teeth wouldn't grow, his mother tried all manner of folk cures — and finally,

She called an old medicine woman from the Sea Islands who cut a sprig of green bush, talked Cuffy's real name to it, and hung the bag upside down in the corner of the room. When she departed she said, "Don't say his true name again for eight months." The mother complied, calling him "Sportcoat," a term she'd overheard while pulling cotton at of the farm of J.C. Yancy of Barnwell County, where she worked shares ...

Deacon King Kong is full of heart, humor, and compassion. It contains page-long sentences that sing and individual lines that stick to your brain like literary taffy. This is a narrative about flawed, poor people navigating an ugly, racist world and trying their best with the help of God, each other, or the bottle; their stories are unique, but the struggles are universal — and that makes this a novel about all of us. In Deacon King Kong, McBride entertains us, and shows us both the beauty and the ugliness of humanity. I say we give him another National Book Award for this one. It's that good.

Gabino Iglesias is an author, book reviewer and professor living in Austin, Texas. Find him on Twitter at @Gabino_Iglesias .

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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.

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Deacon King Kong

By james mcbride.

Book review, full book summary and synopsis for Deacon King Kong by James McBride, a lively and compassionate story about a shooting in the projects of South Brooklyn.

(The Full Plot Summary is also available, below)

Full Plot Summary

In September 1969 in South Brooklyn, 71-year-old Deacon Cuffy Jasper Lambkin , also known as " Sportcoat ", drunkenly goes to the plaza of the Causeway Housing Projects and shoots Deems Clemens , a 19-year-old local drug dealer. No one knows why he shot him. Sergeant Potts , an older officer, and his young partner, Officer Mitch , are sent to investigate and arrest Sportcoat. Sixteen people saw the shooting, but no one talks.

Sportcoat is the deacon of the community church, Five Ends Baptist , and a good man. But he's also a drunk who has had a rough life and whose wife Hettie died two years prior. He still has imaginary conversations with her (often regarding some missing church funds that she took). He was also once the coach for the Causeway baseball team, and Deems was once its star player. However, after his grandfather died, Deems left to deal drugs and is now part of a network of dealers controlled by Bunch Moon .

Everyone assumes Sportcoat is a dead man after the shooting, but Deems doesn't retaliate against Sportcoat because of their history. Bunch sends Earl , his right-hand-man, to rough up Sportcoat (to send a warning about disrupting his business), but Earl's attempts are comedically thwarted each time. Potts's investigation is also hindered by everyone's vague answers about Sportcoat's whereabouts, so Sportcoat remains a free man.

Elsewhere in the Causeway, Tommy Elephante (the "Elephant") is a guy who deals in storing and moving contraband, though he refuses to mess with drugs. (Coincidentally, Sportcoat works as a gardener for Elephante's mother one day a week.) Tommy wants to marry a nice woman, move to a farm and get out of this life. He is approached by someone called The Governor , who knew his father, Guido , in prison. Guido was storing a valuable item (a small statue called the Venus of Willendorf ) for the Governor before he passed away. The Governor has a buyer offering 3 million for it, and he wants Elephante's help so they can locate it and sell it together.

Meanwhile, there's a drug war brewing. Bunch's supplier is Joe Peck , an Italian mobster, but Bunch has a plan to cut Peck out. Bunch also gets wind that Deems has an idea to cut Bunch out and deal with Peck directly. As a result, Bunch brings in a dangerous killer, " Harold Dean " (which turns out to be Haroldeen ), to deal with Sportcoat, Deems and Peck.

One night by the pier, Sportcoat wants to talk to Deems about giving up the drug trade and playing ball again. However, Haroldeen makes her move, shooting Deems, Sausage (Sportcoat's best friend) and Beanie (Deems's right hand man). Sausage survives, but Beanie dies. Deems falls in the water and nearly drowns, but Sportcoat saves him. Afterwards, Haroldeen (who works for but has been misused by Bunch) meets up with Bunch and gets half her money. The other half is due when the rest of the job is completed, but she betrays him instead and leads Peck to him. Peck and his men kill Bunch.

After the pier shooting, Sportcoat realizes he wants to get sober. He goes to visit Sister Paul , one of the original founders of Five Ends Baptist. She tells him how Five Ends got started. It involved a young Guido Elephante preventing a young Officer Potts from getting shot. That same night, Guido asked a passerby, Sister Paul, for help in driving away some stolen cargo. Later, Guido repaid that favor by helping them secure the land for the church. He also asked them to hide the Venus of Willendorf statue for him, something only Sister Paul (and now Sportcoat) knew about.

Time passes. Sportcoat relays this story to Elephante, and Elephante gets engaged to the Governor's daughter. They find the statute, and Elephante does his deal. Afterwards, Elephante helps Sportcoat by replacing the missing church money and paying to renovate the church.

Twenty-two months after Sportcoat shot Deems, Sportcoat passes away. Deems is now playing pro-ball. Sportcoat knew that he would drink again, so he decides to go to the harbor instead where Hettie killed herself and walk into the water. As he does, he tells Sausage the water is beautiful and drowns himself.

For more detail, see the full Chapter-by-Chapter Summary .

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Book Review

Deacon King Kong by James McBride is not the type of book I ordinarily would have chosen for myself. If it hadn’t popped up on Oprah’s book club, I probably wouldn’t have given it much consideration.

Of course, having read it, I’m really glad I did and I hope others give it a shot, too.

I typically associate books (and media in general) about drug dealers, drunks, shootings and/or gangsters with being full of machismo, in a way that I don’t have a ton of patience for. Book Oprah’s book club picks tend to be the opposite of that, so I suspected my initial assumptions about it might be wrong. After reading it, I can confirm that this is a absolutely a story that’s more about community and compassion and not at all about strutting around with big guns.

When Deacon King Kong starts, everything feels a little chaotic, and there’s tons of small pieces of information flying by. I started off a little skeptical, honestly. After the first few chapters, I put it down for a few days, unsure whether I’d finish it.

A few more chapters in though, the basic plot becomes clearer, and I felt more acclimated with McBride’s energetic writing style. By the time the story really starts to come together and a lot of the small details from the beginning gain new relevance, I knew I was going to be trying to convince people to read this book.

If you’re someone who likes stories about the underdog, then this is for you, cause this book is chock full of ’em. McBride writes from the heart, and the fondness and love he has for his imperfect, downtrodden characters and their neglected community shines through. In Deacon King Kong , this forgotten and disregarded community comes alive and is filled with warmth and personality.

McBride grew up in Brooklyn’s Red Hook housing projects, so I assume knows what he’s talking about when it comes to life in the projects. I would also assume that his love and respect for these characters stems from that as well. The book starts with a church deacon shooting a local drug dealer in broad daylight, but it brings in a whole cast of characters from their community and beyond and then binds them all together. McBride endows them all with vivid personalities in a way that makes you feel like he cares individually for each one of his literary creations.

Stylistically, the story is told in kind of a frenetic and almost playful kind of way. (To that point, I’d recommend reading an excerpt to help to determine if it’s to your taste. If you check it out and you’re on the fence, I’d encourage you to give it a shot.) The main character is a bit of a mess, and his discombobulated state makes for a number of humorous interludes, with an almost silly, slapstick atmosphere running throughout the novel.

However, the book’s humor and gamesome narration masks a very real story tackling a range of not-so-playful topics. Sportcoat is broken-hearted over the death of his wife and destruction of a community he worked so hard to repair. As their former baseball coach, he helped to raise the boys around him to become men, only to watch them become drug dealers, lured in by the false promises of rich, corrupt people that live far from the projects.

In the backdrop of Sportcoat’s personal struggles and hijinks, there’s also a drug war brewing in the projects. Multiple parties are vying for supremacy and to cut others out of the trade. As these stories came together, I was surprised at how much cleverness, heart and empathy it had.

Finally, if you’re like me, you might’ve read the title of the book and thought, what exactly is a deacon? It’s a fair question! And it’s also a running joke in the book (none of the characters seem to know what exactly a deacon is or does). After finishing the book, I can tell you, no, I still don’t know what a deacon is.

Read it or Skip it?

I hope that people give this book a shot. I should warn you it’s not the easiest read initially, as the story feels a bit chaotic at the onset, but once you get a handle on his writing style and basic plot, it’s really not a difficult read. It’s also very funny in parts and written with a lot of warmth and compassion.

(And if you do find yourself getting a little lost, you can check out my synopsis / chapter-by-charter summary ! There’s no shame in needing a little clarification!)

I really enjoyed this. This book is more on the literary side of what is typically considered a “book club read”, but I think this one would be a fantastic pick if you or your crew is up for something that falls firmly in the “literary fiction” category. It’s a worthwhile book that is well-deserving of the time required to read it.

What do you think? Have you read this, or is this a book you’d consider? See Deacon King Kong on Amazon .

Deacon King Kong Questions & Answers

Who was supplying the cheese?

This answer isn’t answered explicitly in the book. We know that Guido originally gave them the cheese, but that it continued to be delivered after he died. At Sportcoat’s funeral, there is a ton of cheese and then there’s none after that.

I think this is a question that’s purposely left somewhat open-ended and open for debate. Sister Gee thinks it was from Jesus, and perhaps that’s a valid interpretation in this case. Any of the alternatives (Sportcoat? Elephante? The Federal Government?) don’t make sense for various reasons. Sportcoat — with what money? Elephante — why would he stop? The Federal Government — why would they stop after Sportcoat’s funeral?

What happened to the Church Christmas Club money box? Why wasn’t it found?

This also isn’t answered explicitly in the book. We know that Hettie was the treasurer for Five Ends Baptist and the box went missing after she died. She has said that the money is in “the palm of His (God’s) hand”, citing the motto of the church. It’s also not clear how much was in there. At the very beginning, Sportcoat asks if it was something like 14 dollars or if it was in the hundreds. By the end, the number has grown to 3-4 thousand.

I think this is left open-ended. It’s possible if Hettie was citing the church’s motto, she found a way to reinvest the money in the church.

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I just watched the new trailer for Godzilla Vs Kong. It looks amazing! The last King Kong movie that came out a few years back was probably my favorite monster movie. I understand it’s not coming to theaters though. It’s going to be on HBO Max. I would have preferred to watch it in the theater, but I guess I’m getting an HBO subscription.

I think I just cracked a rib laughing so hard! :D

I loved the book. BUT, there’s one large missing piece, where did Sportcoat go for the last 14 months of his life? He wasn’t seen by Sister Gee or anyone else. Only Sausage suddenly met him on the last day of his life.

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BookBrowse Reviews Deacon King Kong by James McBride

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Deacon King Kong

by James McBride

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James McBride's Deacon King Kong is a humorous take on Black life in "the Projects."

[I]f your visiting preacher had diabetes and weighed 450 pounds and gorged himself with too much fatback and chicken thighs at the church repast and your congregation needed a man strong enough to help that tractor-trailer-sized wide-body off the toilet seat and out onto the bus back to the Bronx so somebody could lock up the dang church and go home – why, Sportcoat was your man.

Which makes it all the more surprising when this peaceful man beloved by all, out of the blue and without warning, shoots a 19-year-old drug dealer one afternoon at the flagpole where the old church women of the neighborhood congregate to exchange the daily gossip. The book is to an extent about unraveling the mystery of what led Sportcoat to do such a thing, as well as detailing the consequences the attack sets in motion. Really, though, the plot is at times almost irrelevant, and in fact barely pokes its head up during the first half of the novel, only showing itself briefly now and then to remind readers that there truly is a unifying story here somewhere. The author embeds deeper topics into the overall narrative, taking on issues like the importance of friendship and trust, the need to be loved, the sense of caring that comes from being part of a community, the effect of racial disparities on communities of color and dealing with change. Primarily, though, McBride seems intent on establishing an atmosphere, conveying the feel of the neighborhood and its residents. Page after page is devoted to character sketches and descriptions of the many tiny facets of life in the Projects. One chapter, for example, is about an annual invasion of ants. This laugh-out-loud account is completely peripheral to the book's storyline, but there's so much color in it, so much vivid detail, that one's mental image of the neighborhood is heightened considerably. Although the novel often feels a bit like a collection of short stories, all the little vignettes add up to an enormously effective portrait of the community as a whole as well as the people that comprise it. When the plot does kick in (somewhere around pages 200 to 250) it's engaging and moves along rapidly, if somewhat improbably. Although the narrative is set in 1969, the issues it raises haven't changed much in the ensuing decades and seem particularly relevant in light of the current Black Lives Matter movement. Black vs. white racial conflict isn't a major theme — or, rather, it's so all-encompassing that it's more a state of being, an undercurrent humming along just below the surface of the entire story. There's a lot of justifiable anger evident under McBride's humor; as a white reader, there were times when I simultaneously found myself laughing and feeling ashamed of the racial disparities that exist and the privileges I have simply because of my skin color. It says a lot about the author's skill, though, that while the novel deepened my understanding of some of the issues Black communities face and left me thoughtful, it still ended up being a feel-good read that had me smiling at the end. Comedy can be tricky to pin down; something one person finds amusing might leave another completely unaffected. Personally, I found Deacon King Kong to be one of the funniest books I've read (and typically I don't "get" a lot of what's billed as humor). I did think that at times the comic passages went on too long, and around the middle of the novel I found myself wishing the author would just get on with the story. Although these passages are quite entertaining, for the most part they do little to further the plot and I became a bit bored with the style. However, the narrative soon kicked into high gear and I was completely engaged from that point until the book's end. Deacon King Kong has appeared on numerous "best of" lists (including BookBrowse's), and it's definitely a worthy entry; it has my vote for one of the best books of the year, at any rate. I highly recommend it to those looking for an exceptionally well-written, light-hearted take on serious subjects. Book groups will likely find many great topics of discussion here.

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Fate and Fury in James McBride’s “Deacon King Kong”

By Jonathan Dee

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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‘Deacon King Kong’ Preaches Righteousness and Hope

“Deacon King Kong” is not for cynics. National Humanities Medalist James McBride’s latest novel points to the good in people, no matter how many bad things they’ve done. Set in 1960s Brooklyn, “Deacon King Kong” examines the aftermath of an alcoholic’s attempted murder of a young drug dealer in the Causeway Housing Projects. While other writers would focus on the senseless violence following such an event — such as Marlon James’ “A Brief History of Seven Killings” — McBride builds a hilariously improbable story of grace and redemption. In the face of alarming structural and personal trauma, “Deacon King Kong” is undeniably human and life-affirming.

Does “Deacon King Kong” feel original? Not especially. Some of the character archetypes — mobster with a heart who wants out, grizzled cop getting close to retirement, elderly woman with prescient information, etc. — have been done to the point of staleness. That said, McBride’s characters transcend their tropes because he humanizes them so well. Part of this dimensionality stems from personal experience. “The characters in ‘Deacon King Kong’ are people I’ve known and loved my whole life,” McBride says. Indeed, these characters are so omnipresent because they were commonplace in mid-century New York.

Take the internal suffering of Thomas Elefante, a gangster known as “The Elephant.” The only words he utters after a change of heart are “‘I wish... somebody would love me.’” Leading up to that acceptance, though, McBride offers a full page of metaphors and descriptions, each more depressing than the last, all focused on portraying Elefante as “a dreamless, friendless, futureless, sorry-ass New York guy.” This context is what makes “Deacon King Kong” flow so well. The actions would seem contrived and unearned without McBride’s emotional backdrop. In one sense, the reader needs this context to root for a character like Elefante; in another, the reader is unwilling to rationalize his decisions without it. Elefante’s message to a cop encapsulates McBride’s mission statement: “‘A lot of saints don’t start out well, but they end that way.’”

“Deacon King Kong” succeeds in more than just grounding unseemly characters. The universe around these characters is exceptionally thought-out and feels alive. He describes the borough in a Dickensian way, comparing it to Manhattan, where jobs are plentiful and rents are high. “The Republic of Brooklyn,” on the other hand, is “where cats hollered like people, dogs ate their own feces... and penniless desperation ruled the life of the suckers too black or too poor to leave.”

By focusing on intensely vulnerable characters, McBride shines a light in the darkness. Almost everyone in “Deacon King Kong” is a victim of abuse. A professional hitwoman — whose name would spoil one of the novel’s funniest plot twists — grows disillusioned with the men who raped her mother and sexualized her from a young age. Sportcoat, the would-be murderer who sets the novel’s events into motion, begins his lifelong love affair with alcohol under the auspices of dental students from the University of South Carolina. “‘The habits you acquired was put on you by the very folks who should have helped you be a better person,’” Sportcoat’s deceased wife tells him.

McBride, for his part, shows that these characters have the capacity to grow and overcome. There’s a sense of distributive justice in “Deacon King Kong,” as the characters who desperately seek change tend to find it. As a 108-year-old woman tells Sportcoat, “‘A blessing favors them that needs it. Don’t matter how it comes. It just matters that it does.’”

These heavy-handed themes may inform the novel, but McBride’s writing reads like a farce. Much of the plot revolves around cases of mistaken identity and false perception. Some cases stem from a bureaucracy that cares little about the Black inhabitants of the Cause House. Sportcoat evades police capture after his attempted murder since the cops are searching for the wrong man, relying on an outdated photo and a false name. (“‘How many names do a colored man need in this world?’” asks one of Sportcoat’s friends after this comes to light.) Elefante fails to notice that Sportcoat — one of the most wanted men in Brooklyn — is his mother’s gardener, even though he crosses paths with him several times. At other points, though, McBride invokes almost-divine intervention to advance the plot. Earl, a hitman sent to pulverize Sportcoat, fails in spectacularly unlikely fashion multiple times. An absurd quest subplot revolves around an incredibly valuable object often dismissed as a “bar of soap.”

All of these elements make “Deacon King Kong” a relentlessly compelling read. The plot’s lightheartedness and the deeply serious subtext paint a complicated yet optimistic picture. While McBride casts overdone characters on this journey, “Deacon King Kong”’s righteousness bleeds through the page enough to make a cynic smile.

— Staff writer Jack M. Schroeder can be reached at [email protected].

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James McBride’s last novel, “The Good Lord Bird,” won the National Book Award in 2013. He’s published other books since then, but now he returns with another big novel: “Deacon King Kong.” The book begins in 1969, and its plot involves several members of a Baptist church in Brooklyn.

[The editors of The Times Book Review chose the 10 best books of 2020 .]

“I’ve had a lot of fun at church,” McBride says on this week’s podcast. “Church is kind of a dysfunctional family, but you’re family, even though it’s dysfunctional. So you might be dealing with someone who’s really, really weird, bizarre, but you kind of accept them. So that made this book a lot easier for me to do, because I understand the relationships that happen in church.”

Also on this week’s episode, Rebecca Solnit discusses her new memoir, “Recollections of My Nonexistence” ; Alexandra Alter talks about visiting Hilary Mantel to discuss the end of her Thomas Cromwell trilogy; and Gregory Cowles, Andrew LaVallee and John Williams talk about what people are reading. Pamela Paul is the host.

Here are the books discussed in this week’s “What We’re Reading”:

“Uncanny Valley” by Anna Wiener

“Black Boy” by Richard Wright

“The Ice Palace” by Tarjei Vesaas

“The Bluest Eye” by Toni Morrison

“Untangled” by Lisa Damour

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Get your free ebook from the free samples menu before you leave, review of deacon king kong, by james mcbride.

Deacon King Kong is a historical fiction novel that appeared in 2020. Author James McBride is an iconic figure in African American literature . He’s one of those Published Authors™ who only needs to write a book every five years or so to keep up his cred. To read my other recent historical fiction book reviews, please check out:

Mistress of the Art of Death , by Ariana Franklin

Antonius, Son of Rome , by Brook Allen

Dying of Whiteness , by Jonathan Menzl

Deacon King Kong takes place in a housing project in 1969 Brooklyn. The story begins with a bang, literally. The Deacon, a seventy-something drunk otherwise known as Sportcoat, shoots infamous teenage drug dealer Deems Clemens in the face. (This is not a spoiler—it happens on page one.) The novel’s plot revolves around the story of the Deacon, Deems (who survives his shooting), and the other characters of the housing project and surrounding neighborhood.

Main Themes of Deacon King Kong

For me, the most powerful theme of Deacon King Kong was the generational conflict it described. McBride portrays 1969 as a time when life in city housing projects altered radically. The older African American residents of the project were people who came north to escape racism in the South in the 1920s and 1930s. (This is known as the Great Migration to historians.) These people were rather poor, worked manual labor-type jobs if they were lucky, and many, like the Deacon, fell prey to things like alcoholism. They also faced opposition from white ethnics who resented their presence in neighborhoods the whites regarded as “theirs.” But the people had community, a shared historical experience, and religious faith.

The younger generation, exemplified by Deems Clemens, is different. Deems was once a brilliant teenage baseball pitcher. But he drifted into slinging dope, lured by the quick money after growing up in poverty. He brought his friends along with him. The older generation of the projects could see drugs infiltrating their neighborhood and knew life there could never be the same again. McBride also implies that the “American Dream” of kids having a better material life than their parents had had was largely a myth for the ( mostly colored ) people of the projects.

This isn’t only true for the African Americans , however. Tommy Elefante, “the Elephant,” is an Italian criminal who runs the docks nearby to the projects. But he sees the same thing that the older projects residents do. He’s made his money smuggling things like TVs, cigarettes, and so forth, but never drugs. The Elephant knows that his time is ending, and he wants out. McBride portrays him very sympathetically. I’m not sure why, though. The Elephant got his nickname for a reason besides his last name. He’s done bad, even murderous, things. But as long as those bad things don’t include drugs, McBride seems to be okay with it.

Style of Deacon King Kong

At times McBride attempts a humorous, tongue-in-cheek tone. I enjoy that, tending in that direction with my own humor. But it’s a weird choice for a book based on shooting a drug dealer. Most of the story isn’t about humorous things. So, while I liked the writing style, it did feel a little off at times.

McBride also offers plenty of sentences that, while grammatically correct, go on and on. The writing isn’t quite Thomas Jefferson -esque, but it takes some getting used to. McBride also breaks some of the “unwritten rules” in places. The first chapter, after the shooting, becomes a series of sketches of the main characters. One chapter is from the point of view of a character who never utters a single line after that chapter. Oh, to be a Published Author™ who can get away with these things in the name of mastery of craft.

In addition, the story doesn’t truly have a main character. You’d think that it’d be the deacon, Sportcoat, given that his name is the title of the book. But I’m not sure he truly qualifies, and I didn’t find him that sympathetic. He spends 95% of the book so drunk he doesn’t even believe he’s the one who shot Deems.

Which brings me to the last unusual thing I’ll mention. The book really doesn’t have a main character to root for. No one is what I’d call heroic. Not all books have to have a classic hero, I understand. I think the point McBride was going for was that in housing projects, the closest to heroic one gets is to find people who aren’t demoralized to the point of despair. People who can show humanity toward their fellow man or woman and find humor and beauty in life are heroic when placed in that environment.

McBride may well be correct here. I’ve never spent time in a housing projects environment, so it’s hard for me to say. But it did make the book suspenseful in an unusual way—I kept waiting for a character to get behind unequivocally.

Given all that, it’s hard for me to settle on a grade for this book. I mostly enjoyed the style of writing. A few plot twists seemed a reach to me, but the character portrayals were excellent. It was weird not having stronger resolution in places, and I’ll admit that the ending left me a little unsatisfied. But the importance of the topic and complexity of the themes offset that to some extent.

So, I’d say that you may well have quite a different reaction to Deacon King Kong than I did. I can see readers giving the book a wide range of reviews, although given the marketing blitz that accompanied the publication of Deacon King Kong , most readers think highly of it. For me, I’ll go with 8 of 10 points. I’m curious to know if anyone reading this post has also read the book and what you thought of it.

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James McBride’s ‘Deacon King Kong’ Is a Rich Novel About the Places That Make Us Who We Are

O n a September day in 1969, in the projects of Brooklyn, a drunken deacon named Sportcoat shoots the local drug dealer, Deems. The community–an ensemble of black, Puerto Rican, Italian and Irish characters, reflecting the diversity that has always made New York City distinct–reacts to the shooting with a combination of gossip, embellishment of details and reflection on what it means for their home. But Sportcoat’s actions also set into motion an underground network of mobsters and malcontents, along with cops and church folk, all trying to get to the bottom of how a washed-up deacon came to shoot a young man he once coached in baseball.

On its surface, Deacon King Kong is about the tension between wayward souls and those on the straight and narrow. But on a deeper level, James McBride’s first novel since his National Book Award–winning The Good Lord Bird is about our deep and complex relationships to the places and people who make us who we are, and how we change–either in spite or because of them. The tie that binds everyone in these pages is how they strive for a life that is safe and steeped in love. Many find that in their faith; a few manage to find it in one another.

Readers of The Good Lord Bird will recognize shades of McBride’s hilarious dialogue and an attention to detail that reveal a complex local history. Capturing humanity through satire and witticisms, McBride draws everyday heroes: bickering church ladies collecting coins for the Christmas Club box; mothers washing the soiled clothes of other people’s children; weathered gangsters sending quality cheese to the projects.

McBride positions Deacon King Kong on the precipice of a profound historical moment: as he illustrates, these knit-together old neighborhoods fell away after broader societal and urban shifts, not just in New York but around the country, beginning in the 1970s after the deaths of civil rights leaders and changemakers. In the new world, there would be nothing so uniting as a town drunk and his love and loathing for the promising ballplayer who turns to drugs. McBride’s novel is a rich and vivid multicultural history. But he also depicts the vulnerability of men who show most of the world only their gruff exteriors, rendered with rare and memorable tenderness.

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• About the Book

From the author of the National Book Award-winning THE GOOD LORD BIRD and the bestselling modern classic THE COLOR OF WATER comes one of the most celebrated novels of the year.

In September 1969, a fumbling, cranky old church deacon known as Sportcoat shuffles into the courtyard of the Cause Houses housing project in south Brooklyn, pulls a .38 from his pocket, and in front of everybody shoots the project's drug dealer at point-blank range.

The reasons for this desperate burst of violence and the consequences that spring from it lie at the heart of DEACON KING KONG, James McBride's funny, moving novel and his first since his National Book Award-winning THE GOOD LORD BIRD. McBride brings to vivid life the people affected by the shooting: the victim, the African-American and Latinx residents who witnessed it, the white neighbors, the local cops assigned to investigate, the members of the Five Ends Baptist Church where Sportcoat was deacon, the neighborhood's Italian mobsters, and Sportcoat himself.

As the story deepens, it becomes clear that the lives of the characters --- caught in the tumultuous swirl of 1960s New York --- overlap in unexpected ways. When the truth does emerge, McBride shows us that not all secrets are meant to be hidden, that the best way to grow is to face change without fear, and that the seeds of love lie in hope and compassion.

Bringing to these pages both his masterly storytelling skills and his abiding faith in humanity, James McBride has written a novel every bit as involving as THE GOOD LORD BIRD and as emotionally honest as THE COLOR OF WATER. Told with insight and wit, DEACON KING KONG demonstrates that love and faith live in all of us.

Deacon King Kong by James McBride

• Publication Date: February 2, 2021
• Genres: Fiction , Historical Fiction
• Paperback: 400 pages
• Publisher: Riverhead Books
• ISBN-10: 0735216738
• ISBN-13: 9780735216730

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Deacon King Kong (Oprah's Book Club): A Novel Paperback – February 2, 2021

• Print length 400 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Riverhead Books
• Publication date February 2, 2021
• Dimensions 5.01 x 1.04 x 7.96 inches
• ISBN-10 0735216738
• ISBN-13 978-0735216730
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This masterwork tells a resonant story of race, religion, grudges, and community in a Brooklyn project.

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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Riverhead Books (February 2, 2021)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 400 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0735216738
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0735216730
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 11.5 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.01 x 1.04 x 7.96 inches
• #15 in Black & African American Historical Fiction (Books)
• #772 in Literary Fiction (Books)

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James mcbride.

James McBride is the author of the award-winning New York Times bestseller, The Color of Water. A former reporter for The Washington Post and People magazine, McBride holds a Masters degree in journalism from Columbia University and a B.A. from Oberlin College.

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