Deacon King Kong: A Novel

by James McBride

Hardcover, 2020

Status

Available

Genres

Collection

Edwin Mitoma Collection

Publication

Riverhead Books (2020), Edition: 1st Edition, 384 pages

Description

"From James McBride, author of the National Book Award-winning The Good Lord Bird, comes a wise and witty novel about what happens to the witnesses of a shooting. 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 .45 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. In Deacon King Kong, 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"--… (more)

Media reviews

Seattle Times

In a city where history is paved over and where the present landscape is defined by scaffolding bent toward an ever-developing future, this novel resists the usual nostalgia for a lost artists’ utopia. Instead, it animates a neighborhood scrimping by and revitalizes another nostalgic sore spot

— that of community.

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— 1 more

Washington Post

Beneath the characters and comedy is a story about how a community and its religious institutions can provide a center to keep things from falling apart completely.

User reviews

LibraryThing member write-review

A Lost World in Brooklyn

James McBride’s Deacon King Kong feels like a paean to community lost forever in time. In interviews, he’s cited 1969, the period of the novel, as a sort of transitional time, after the assassination of MLK and the advent of large scale criminal drug operations in New

York’s housing projects. The world he creates, while not glossing over the extreme poverty and municipal neglect of housing projects once build for Italians and other immigrant groups, seems to express a palpable sadness over losing the tight knit quality of his fictional Causeway Housing located in Brooklyn. McBride himself grew up in the Red Hook Houses, a massive group of intermediate height buildings erected in the 1930s and first occupied by what at the time were called the “worthy poor.” In his novel, Italians, Puerto Ricans, and African Americans still live together in and around the Causeway Houses, and as the novel progresses we discover that even as the area changed, some people were able to see beyond color enough to work together, at least on occasion. So we have a collection of interesting Runyonesque characters right down to names and distinctive syntax that sounds almost like Runyonese. In McBride’s skillful hands, it all adds up to a delightful reading experience that blends character, history, and suspense in a pleasing package.

The novel opens with Deacon Cuffy Lambkin, the Deacon King Kong of the title for his heavy consumption of his pal’s corn liquor, arguing with his dead wife Hettie and moving on to shoot Deems Clemens, a nineteen year old heroin dealer. He and Deems have a history. Sportcoat, as he is also known, for his flamboyant sports coats, taught Deems in Sunday school and served as his baseball coach. He was convinced Deems would make it to the majors, but Deems went for the fast money selling drugs. The shooting turns Sportcoat into a marked man, though finding him proves a very humorous challenge, as he roams around the projects in search of Christmas club money collected and hidden by Hettie before her death. In addition, other intrigues spin around the projects, with Bunch Moon paranoid about rivals cutting into his drug dealing empire, Joe Peck, in the employ of the Italian mob, angling for the territory, and Tom Elefante working at maintaining his independence as a small time transferrer of smuggled good from his boxcar located on the East River within shouting distance of the projects. All these characters are interconnected. How becomes evident as Elefante seeks a missing and reputedly valuable little sculpture spirited out of German after WWII and entrusted to his father by an Irish gangster in the Bronx now on his deathbed. How all these characters, and several others, come to understand their interdependence makes up the crux of the novel, a tale wove together with plenty of good humor by McBride. It’s not too much to reveal that everything works itself out in the end with the characters of good heart having their wishes fulfilled in the end. Dire and rough as these characters’ lives are, McBride leaves your feeling that they process a spirit and zest that often feels missing in modern life.

If you’re looking for a novel in which you can lose yourself for a few hours, one that illustrates without preaching about the importance of community and relationships, and that demonstrates every human life has value and each can enrich the other, you won’t go wrong with McBride’s very good Deacon King Kong.

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LibraryThing member ellengryphon

Deacon King Kong is a bit Brooklyn Fairytale, a bit of crime/whodunnit novel and part sweet character development. James McBride brings some of these characters fully to life, and some are left quite hazy. By the time you finish the last page you feel great affection Sportcoat, aka Deacon King

Kong, aka Cuffy Lampkin, you are rooting for Sister Gee, who is on the brink of finding love after a life of cleaning up other people's messes. You are rooting for Officer Potts, the son of Irish immigrants and an NYPD officer on the verge of retirement. You hope that Elefante, a small-tim
e mobster wanting to retreat to a life outside the Italian mafia, finds a way to do that. You hope that Deems, the local drug dealer who before discovering the profits of selling drugs was gifted baseball pitcher, also finds a way to happiness beyond the turf battles over drugs that are beginning to grip Brooklyn public housing projects. The book features a dizzying array of colorful characters, all striving for comfort and a better life. There are so many characters, in fact, that one feels the need to diagram them all out. But at the core of this story is the importance of a caring community, of friendships, of living by the Golden Rule and getting by despite tough circumstances. Deacon King Kong is a colorful, very lively and endearing tale of redemption, and a slice of life lived to the best of these characters' abilities. McBride took a very different path with this novel, so very different from his prior (and great) efforts, and yet Deacon King Kong, like its title character, does not disappoint.

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LibraryThing member RidgewayGirl

The story begins in 1969 when an elderly alcoholic named Sportcoat stumbles into the central plaza of a Brooklyn housing project and shoots a drug dealer. What follows is just the kind of novel we all need right now, a crowded and good-hearted romp through difficult circumstances and challenging

times. Peopled with the residents of the Cause, the members of the Five Ends Baptist Church, some Italian gangsters and a lovelorn Irish cop, this novel has several plot lines involving dozens of characters and yet manages to make all of them come to life. There's real heart in this book, even as it never looks away from the challenges they all face or of the way their small piece of New York is changing forever.

And through it all goes Sportcoat, always looking for his next drink, haunted by the ghost of his wife and never quite understanding what all the fuss is about.

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LibraryThing member aimeesue

James McBride's new novel, Deacon King Kong is a phenomenal story of a community and the webs that connect the people within the neighborhood of New York City's Causeway Housing Project to the world at large. I was torn while reading this book - on one hand, I wanted to read late into the night and

see where these people were going; on the other, I wanted to linger and spend my days hanging around the flag pole plaza for as long as possible.

The story begins in 1969, in the community of the Cause Houses, where an old drunk named Sportcoat shoots a young baseball phenom called Deems, who has turned from sports to the easy money of drug dealing. The shooting sets off reverberations for the main characters, which ripple out through the community, the church, and into the wider world.

At base, it's a plot most of us have heard before - poverty, lack of opportunity, and the promise of easy money leading to drug dealing, crime and competing factions, and ending in violence and far- reaching consequences for all. But McBride's genius here is in his web-spinning, the way he illuminates the tenuous, hidden strands connecting his characters to each other, whether they live in the Cause Houses or on the nearby streets outside. His characters, from Sportcoat himself to Sister Gee and The Elephant, are so vividly drawn that I know I'll be thinking about them for a long time to come. These people are not caricatures. They are full-fledged beings with particular histories and motivations that make the reader laugh with them and grow anxious about what the future holds for them. McBride has endowed them with a depth of humanity that's truly touching, whether that connection stems from delight or sorrow. A story with heart and love and wit, Deacon King Kong celebrates what it is to be in and of community, our lives touching others, and theirs touching us.

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LibraryThing member debann6354

Deacon King Kong is an amazing book. After reading the first chapter I was not sure I was going to continue, could not keep track of the characters with names like Sportcoat and Hot Sausage. Nevertheless I plowed on and was richly rewarded. James McBride invited me into the world of Five Ends, an

area of Brooklyn, population consisted mostly African Americans and public housing. I became invested in all the characters, with all their nuances, humor and real struggles. I liked the way the lives of the different characters intersected. Most will stay in my mind forever.

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LibraryThing member GrandmaCootie

Deacon King Kong is the first book I have ever read written by author James McBride, but just a page in I knew I was going to love it, and I did. The story starts in September 1969, when Sportcoat, an old drunken church deacon who lost his wife a few years ago but still sees and talks to her,

living in one of the New York housing projects, decides one day for some unknown reason to shoot the project’s young drug dealer. At point-blank range and in front of plenty of witnesses.

The story just takes off from there. It is difficult to pull together a seemingly mostly unrelated cast of characters, events, background, history into a set of coherent, cohesive stories and then weave those threads into a cohesive novel, but James McBride has done it with what looks like ease. All the side trips to discuss supporting characters and their pasts are just long enough, just tantalizing enough to keep your interest, add to the big picture, and not get off track and become boring or distracting.

Deacon King Kong looks at Sportcoat, the witnesses to the shooting and those affected by it, as well as the time, the place, the culture, the society, the turmoil. It’s a satisfyingly close-up look at life in the projects, and life in general, about people who have made choices in life – or who have had life make choices for them. McBride is a masterful storyteller, creating vivid characters and scenarios and a tale that is both funny and moving.

Thanks to Penguin Random House for providing an advance copy of Deacon King Kong for my reading pleasure and honest review. All opinions are my own. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and James McBride has become one of my must-read authors.

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LibraryThing member PatsyMurray

This book is a real treat. It is funny, warm and humane. In the end, everyone gets their just due and it feels right. I will be looking for more books by James McBride.

LibraryThing member annbury

This novel is old fashioned in a way, despite its focus on a very current issue -- relations between Black people and White people. The "old-fashionedness" is the way the novel is written and structured. Like Dickens or other 19th century writers, it is packed with people. fully realized characters

who touch your heart. And like older novels, it is driven by plot, full of surprises, and includes at least two love stories. Also, the book is brilliantly written, full of vivid images and lovely prose. It got more and more engrossing as I read on, and by the time I finished I was sad to have finished.

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LibraryThing member nmele

What a wonderful novel! McBride has written a wild ride of a story, plotted like a farce and full of comic but dignified characters, that is both a tragedy and a comedy; I don't really want to say more than that but I should say that some of the wildest and most disparate plot threads come together

in. logical and almost foreseeable climax. I enjoyed every minute of this novel.

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LibraryThing member jay_juud

James McBride is the acclaimed author of the National Book Award winning novel The Good Lord Bird (2013). He also wrote the popular memoir The Color of Water: A Black Man’sTribute to His White Mother (1995), which spent two years on the New York Times bestseller list; wrote the historical World

War II novel Miracle of St. Anna (2002), which was made into a 2008 film of the same name by Spike Lee; has received significant recognition (including a Stephen Sondheim and a Richard Rogers award) as a composer and saxophonist; and was awarded a 2015 National Humanities Medal by President Obama for what the president called “humanizing the complexities of discussing race in America. Through writings about his own uniquely American story, and his works of fiction informed by our shared history, his moving stories of love display the character of the American family.” Yet for all of this, it’s possible that his most recent novel, Deacon King Kong, may be his highest achievement.

You might feel a trifle overwhelmed in the first chapter as you are introduced to some twenty characters living in the Causeway Housing Projects in South Brooklyn, characters with names like “Bum-Bum,” “Hot Sausage,” Dominic Lefleur the “Haitian Sensation,” “The Elephant,” Sister Gee, and “The Cousins” (Nanette and Sweet Corny). But the crowd makes you feel at home in the projects, kind of like a big block party. That is, until our title character pulls out a .45-caliber Luger pistol in front of sixteen witnesses and shoots into the face of a 19-year-old local drug dealer named Deems Clemens. Deems turns at the last moment and the bullet grazes the side of his head, taking off most of his ear. The shooter is “Deacon” Cuffy Lambkin (known to most of the folks in the Causeway as “Sportcoat,” but sometimes called “Deacon King Kong” after the best home-made liquor in the neighborhood cooked up by the janitor Rufus on the next block). The 71-year-old Sportcoat used to coach the Causeway Houses boys’ baseball team and Deems had been the team’s star pitcher, who seemed destined to a career of college ball that might lead to a major league contract, until he’d been sidetracked into making fast money working for a drug kingpin. Sportcoat had also been Deems’ Sunday School teacher at the local Five Ends Baptist Church, where Sportcoat is now a deacon (though one of the novel’s running jokes is that nobody seems to know exactly what a deacon does). None of this explains why Sportcoat shot Deems, and Sportcoat doesn’t seem to remember himself, once the alcoholic deacon comes around after his drunken spree.

And this is just the first chapter. But it isn’t only the roistering, turbulent action that gets your blood stirred up while reading this book. It’s also the author’s style. We are often treated to long sentences that go off like a string of firecrackers, their sense turning again and again in a flamboyant surge of multilayered perspective. In one curious chapter called “The March of the Ants,” McBride describes the annual visit of a colony of Colombian ants to the projects, who make their pilgrimage specifically to eat a load of cheese that is mysteriously delivered to the neighborhood every month—sent by Jesus according to some members of Five Ends Church. About the ants arriving from Colombia, McBride writes,

“And there they 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.”

The author who comes closest to matching this kind of writing, to my mind, is that other chronicler of race in America, William Faulkner, whose wandering, colloquial sentences require similar mental gymnastics on the part of the reader. That comparison with Faulkner is not just out of the blue. Like Faulkner, McBride is not shy in demonstrating the hardships with which white Americans have, even unconsciously, burdened black Americans, but is also more than happy to explore areas of common humanity and the opportunities for true love and partnership across racial and ethnic lines. And so it is in this novel.

In this regard, of course, it is the individual characters who play the greatest part. There are plenty of characters in Deacon King Kong, some quirkier than others, but for the most part presented sympathetically, as from a perspective of someone who actually likes people in all their various shapes and forms. The main characters here all tend to be looking for something: Sportcoat is looking for the church’s Christmas Fund, which may have had anything from three to five thousand dollars in it, and which his late wife Hettie hid away and never told anybody where before she died. Hettie, by the way, still argues with him on a regular basis. Or at least, he is constantly arguing with her. As for Deems, like everybody else, he’d like to know why Sportcoat shot him. He’d also like to break away from his supplier and switch to another, which means that the out-of-town assassin sent to punish Sportcoat is likely to be after him as well. The Elephant, an Italian gangster involved in smuggling and transporting stolen property but who refuses to have anything to do with drugs, is approached by an old Irish friend of his father’s (who happens to own a bagel shop—go figure) who is looking for a valuable object he gave to Elephant Senior for safekeeping, something the size of “a bar of soap,” but the Elephant has no clue where it’s hidden. And then there’s the Irish cop Dobbs, who wants to protect Deems and/or Sportcoat, but is also only a few months from retirement, whom nobody in the church really trusts except perhaps Sister Gee, the pastor’s wife. And besides all of that, where in heaven’s name is that cheese coming from every month?

These questions are ultimately all intertwined, as are the characters’ lives, and some answers may surprise you and others you’ll see coming a mile away. I won’t give any spoilers here, but the final impression you get of the Causeway Projects is that this is a neighborhood held together “in the palm of God’s hand,” as the motto of Five Ends Baptist Church puts it. McBride himself grew up in a South Brooklyn housing project, and his parents founded the New Brown Memorial Baptist Church in Red Hook, Brooklyn. So it’s no surprise that both the church and the neighborhood of this novel seem so vividly real. The fact that McBride’s father was black and his mother a Jew who converted to Christianity may be one reason that he refuses to demonize any group of characters in the book. It’s probably also significant that the action of the novel takes place in 1969—the summer of the moon landing, Woodstock, and, most importantly, the triumph of the Miracle Mets who pulled off their incredible and inexplicable World Series run that year. It takes an apparent miracle for things to work out in this novel, and McBride frames the book with a beginning dedication “For God’s people—all of ’em,” and ends it with an acknowledgement that reads “Thanks to the humble Redeemer who gives us the rain, the snow, and all the things in between.” For that time in between, it seems we are in the palm of God’s hand, so it should be no surprise that things work out for the people in the novel. All of ’em.

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LibraryThing member browner56

It is September of 1969 and the world is changing at a rapid pace. A man has just walked on the moon, Woodstock has rewritten music history, and the New York Mets are about to win the World Series. But for the residents of Cause Houses, a housing project near the abandoned docks of Brooklyn, the

changes are of a much more threatening nature. The amount of drugs in their midst, with the attendant participation of organized crime, has recently exploded, replacing the more petty forms of graft and corruption the neighborhood has tolerated for decades. So, when an elderly drunk known to all as Sportcoat shoots a young drug dealer who he used to coach in baseball and teach in Sunday School, it sets in motion a dizzying array of actions and events, the repercussions of which permanently transform the lives of those living around Cause and the Five Ends Baptist church.

In Deacon King Kong, James McBride weaves this amazing story with all the humor, wisdom, and panache that anyone who has read his equally engaging The Good Lord Bird would expect. Taking off from Sportcoat’s singular act of defiance—which he was too drunk on King Kong, his homebrewed libation of choice, to even remember—the author expands rapidly to describe the many likely and unlikely ties that bind together the people belonging to this multi-racial, multi-ethnic, multi-religion, and multi-generational community. And, to be sure, this tale is nothing if not a celebration of community, taking both the blessings and the warts in the balance. The people of Cause Houses cannot survive without each other—although they certainly would like to try from time to time—and McBride brings out the essential humanity of the collective lives they lead and the secrets they keep for one another.

I really liked this book, which was a moving and satisfying reading experience from beginning to end. With Sportcoat (aka Deacon King Kong, for his two most prominent passions), the author has created an unforgettable protagonist for the ages. In fact, McBride does a wonderful job fleshing out all of the many, many characters—Hot Sausage, Sister Gee, The Elephant, Deems, Hettie, and Officer Potts, to name but a very few—that populate this sprawling patchwork of a story. This is a novel that is frequently funny, sometimes grim, occasionally thoughtful and philosophical, but never dull. Above all else, it is a deeply compassionate look at a group of people who never lose faith in themselves or each other, despite facing some very long odds. I can recommend this book without the slightest hesitation.

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LibraryThing member annbury

great book the story is set in a brooklyn project in 1969, just before heroin destroys the neighberhood. a great read, it is part mystery and part love story,

LibraryThing member msf59

“ Sportcoat was a walking genius, a human disaster, a sod, a medical miracle, and the greatest baseball umpire that the Cause Houses had ever seen...”

“After practice on lazy summer afternoons, he’d gather the kids around and tell stories about baseball players long dead, players from the

old Negro leagues with names that sounded like brands of candy: Cool Papa Bell, Golly Honey Gibson, Smooth Rube Foster, Bullet Rogan, guys who knocked the ball five hundred feet high into the hot August air at some ballpark far away down south someplace, the stories soaring high over their heads...”

It is the late summer of 1969, in south Brooklyn, a seventy year old church deacon, drunk as usual, pulls a gun and shoots the local drug dealer. This shooting sets off a whole series of events that rock this neighborhood. Sportcoat, having no memory of this violent incident, is forced to go underground, with the help of his community. It is an absolute marvel to get lost in McBride's storytelling and he clearly knows Brooklyn, with a deep passion and understanding. He is a true master and the cast of characters, he creates here, are all wonderful, but leading the pack is Sportcoat, who is one of the great literary creations. Nice to have McBride back.

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LibraryThing member 37143Birnbaum

Not all that great.

LibraryThing member Perednia

Tale of an NYC neighborhood on the cusp of change that is relevant today, with engaging characters and, at its center, a big heart.

LibraryThing member nancyjean19

Within the first chapter, this book made me laugh out loud. Each character has depth, thoughtfulness, and humor that makes you care about them and their stories. It’s also a portrait of a community and how everyone is connected to each other, often in ways they don’t fully grasp. Reading it, I

felt like I was at the east river, looking over at the statue of Iiberty, or walking along industrial streets. It was nice to take a trip to a different part of the city again.

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LibraryThing member SamSattler

James McBride only came to my attention in 2013 with his excellent novel of historical fiction called The Good Lord Bird, a novel set in the 1850s that included such figures as Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglas, and others. Despite the seriousness of the times and the historical figures featured,

McBride’s novel was often as funny as just about anything I’ve read. McBride takes the same approach with 2020’s Deacon King Kong, a novel set in a black Brooklyn neighborhood in 1969. Looking back, it’s easy to see that those were simpler times, even in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty as this neighborhood is – but all of that was about to change. Organized crime was jumping into the drug trade with both feet, and drug dealers had staked their claim on the Deacon’s neighborhood corners.

Deacon King Kong (nicknamed that because the Five Ends Baptist Church deacon really, really loved the local moonshine called King Kong) one day decided he had seen enough of one particular drug dealer. The deacon, also known as Sportcoat because of the flashy jackets he liked to wear, knows the nineteen-year-old dealer well, having taught the boy in Sunday School for years and coached him on the housing project’s baseball team right up until the boy gave up baseball for dealing drugs. When Sportcoat finally has enough, he has enough, and one day he walks up to the corner controlled by his old friend Deems, pulls out a gun, and shoots the young man in the head.

No one in the neighborhood can believe what the old church deacon has done, much less explain it. Even more mysterious is that Sportcoat is still, more or less, going about his neighborhood business as if nothing has happened. Why isn’t he running for his life? Surely, everyone thinks, someone is going to get even with him for disrupting the drug trade like he did. It’s just a matter of time.

But Deacon King Kong is less about one man taking the law into his own hands than it is about a neighborhood in transition. The neighborhood, once the home of Italian and Irish immigrants who worked the docks there, is now almost exclusively black. McBride, rather than having everything seen through the eyes of Sportcoat, uses several other characters to illustrate how one man’s decision impacts the entire community. In alternating chapters, the reader hears from Sportcoat and his best friend, “Sausage;” a soon-to-retire NYPD cop; a local Italian smuggler; a powerful drug boss; and a few others.

Bottom Line: Deacon King Kong, bloody and violent as it often is, can still be laugh-out-loud funny when McBride is describing everyday life in the neighborhood. Sportcoat, and those closest to him, are all old enough to have come up in the pre-Civil Rights Movement South, and all of them are somewhat scarred by those years. That experience still influences the way they deal with other races and with each other in 1969, but remarkably enough, that’s also the source of much of the humor on display in Deacon King Kong. There are some memorable characters here, and McBride tells their story well. Surprisingly – or not, I’m still not sure – most of the criticism I’ve heard about the book is coming from black readers who find the characters and their behavior embarrassing.

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LibraryThing member jnwelch

I LOVED Deacon King Kong by James McBride, the author of The Color of Water and The Good Lord Bird. Five stars.

Sportcoat is an elderly but still vital man also known as Deacon King Kong, because he's a deacon at the local church and loves to drink King Kong, a potent bootleg drink. It's 1969, in a

NYC housing project. McBride fills the story with a large cast of colorful characters - Deems, the baseball pitching sensation who now runs the project's drug deals at age 19; Hot Sausage, Sportcoat's close buddy and fellow King Kong enthusiast; Sister Gee, still turning heads at 50, including that of white Officer Potts, and Elefante, an Italian organized crime headman who lives with his mother, won't sell drugs, and wants only to find a large "country girl" to live with in peace in the countryside.

Sportcoat lost his wife Hettie a short while ago, and still talks to her all the time. While drunk, he confronts drug dealer Deems in a way that endangers his life. How he manages to blithely evade his pursuers made me laugh. Many of the characters, including Sportcoat, have big hearts, and a lot to say about living full black (and brown) lives in America. By the end, the depth of Sportcoat's wisdom, happiness and strength becomes evident, and the finish fits beautifully.

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LibraryThing member nivramkoorb

This is the 3rd book that I have read by McBride and it is easily the best. If fact this is the best book I have read this year and one the best in a long time. It takes place in a Brooklyn housing project in 1969. It consists of many characters that are hard to keep track of but McBride does a

great job. HIs prose is bouncy, funny and he does a great job of portraying the mixing of the Afro-American, Latino, and white groups in South Brooklyn at the time. These are characters that you may never encounter in your life but they existed. The main character is "Sportcoat" a 71 year old black man who loves his King Kong hard liquor. To try and sum up the plot would not do this book justice. Simply read it. It touches on so much about community, being poor, drugs, the church, gangsters, cops etc. Read this book and if you don't like it, send me a message and we can discuss it.

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LibraryThing member berthirsch

Book review- Deacon King Kong
The latest novel from James McBride, an author I first encountered some 25 years ago when he wrote a stunningly personal and enlightening memoir entitled, The Color of Water. In that book he told the story of his family of origin and childhood spent in the New York City

boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens.

In this latest book he revisits those times and places. Deacon King Kong is an elderly widower who lives in the Cause Public Housing Project. There he and his fellow residents, many of them African Americans who moved up North following the end of WW II, live, work, and persevere. Their migration resulted in a cultural change in Red Hook Brooklyn, replacing Italian and Irish civil servants who moved out to other sections of Brooklyn and the suburbs.

The year is 1969, a time of civil unrest. The Deacon and his fellow residents have built an insular community within the confines of the projects they live in. The host of characters McBride creates are memorable, touching, funny and unique. Besides the buildings and the central flagpole plaza where much of the action takes place is the Five Points Baptist Church that the Southern blacks built when they first arrived. The women of the church, sisters are depicted as the matriarchal force that keeps things going while the boys and men of the project focus more around sports, drinking and drug dealing.

On the outskirts of the projects is the larger community, therein resides Italian gangsters, pushers, smugglers, and con men. Additionally, the police who patrol the neighborhood are outsiders and control agents. It is the tension between all these different contagions that produces the suspense and action as the novel unfolds.

McBride’s writing is filled with affection and street-smart banter. In a sense he has created a Dickens-like tableau, filled with characters of both moral and ill dispute. There is a clear empathy and enjoyment with which McBride unfolds the tale and the reader easily falls in love with many of the characters depicted.

While reading the book I listened to a few interviews McBride participated in as part of the promotion. He has a melodious easy canter which is also reflected in his writing. He clearly intended this book to be a celebration of a certain time and place and people. He also filled the book with the sense of hope, love, and optimism he has for our current times. Aware of the historic racial divides in America, McBride holds out a vision in which we can all live with respect and admiration.

This is a totally enjoyable and uplifting piece of fiction.

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LibraryThing member Hccpsk

Deacon King Kong by James McBride brings a little bit of everything to the table--slapstick humor, social commentary, a mystery, historical references, romance, religion, mafia...the list could go on and on. It’s a bit much for the first third of the book, but once the actual plot gets moving it

all starts to coalesce into something pretty magical. It’s 1969 in New York, and at the heart of the novel is Sportcoat, an elderly drunk just getting by working odd jobs and talking to his dead wife. When he shoots the neighborhood drug dealer in a drunken haze, he sets off a series of events that affect the entire community. McBride’s storytelling skills shine as he follows a number of neighborhood characters as they try to piece together exactly what happened while looking for a mysterious treasure. His writing is not for everyone as he breaks all the rules of comma usage and run-on sentences, but those who appreciate it will not be disappointed.

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LibraryThing member waldhaus1

The foundation of the story is the character development. The loaner ends up feeling all are well known to him or her.
An interesting view of a housing project in New York and the relationship between the blacks, Italians, and Irish. King Kong is the name given to some home made Corn liquor.

LibraryThing member TooBusyReading

This novel is rife with Black stereotypes – the young drug dealer, the church ladies, the not-so-deaconly deacon. I was having trouble getting into the story – it just wasn't grabbing my attention. But when yet another instance of bad things happening to animals at around 25%, I gave up. For

me, this novel didn't promise enough payback to be worth the effort. Disappointing, because I loved The Color of Water when I read it several years ago. Three stars simply because it might have potential I never got to.

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LibraryThing member KatyBee

Great writing that brings a 1969 Brooklyn housing project and its black church to life. Funny, energetic, big-hearted novel with a crowd of the best characters ever.

LibraryThing member maryreinert

I laughed, I cried. Loved this book and all the colorful but believable characters in it. An interesting and twisted plot tells of an old drunk man, Sportscoat, who is a deacon in the Five Ends Baptist Church, a local handyman, a baseball umpire who used to coach young baseball, and a local

character known by all. One day, Sportscoat, openly shoots a young drug dealer, Deems Clemons; a young man who once was the best pitcher in Brooklyn Housing Projects had ever seen. Now Deems hold court at the local flagpole selling drugs. Sportscoat doesn't remember shooting Deems' ear off, because he was so drunk. The local residents can't believe it either but do all they can to keep Sportscoat from the police especially his best friend Hot Sausage (Sausage and Sportscoat share a driver's license).

The plot gets twisted with Italian mafia, young stupid drug dealers, Baptist women from Five Ends, a white cop hoping to retire. Sportscoat still talks to his wife Hettie, who death by drowning in the river by the dock - mainly asking her where she did the Christmas Fund money from Five Ends - it will soon be needed.

This is a totally funny story interspersed with poignant moments of truth, faith, love, and silliness. Great read.

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