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James McBride’s ‘Deacon King Kong’ offers a rollicking examination of a community | Book review

Beneathcharacters and comedy is a story about how a neighborhood and its religious institutions can provide a center to keep things from falling apart completely.

"Deacon King Kong" by James McBride.
"Deacon King Kong" by James McBride.Read moreCourtesy of Riverhead Books

Deacon King Kong

By James McBride

Riverhead. 370 pp. $28

Reviewed by Bethanne Patrick

Deacon King Kong, the new book from Lambertville author and musician James McBride, is a hilarious, pitch-perfect comedy set in the Brooklyn projects of the late 1960s. This alone may qualify it as one of the year’s best novels. However, McBride — the author of the National Book Award-winning The Good Lord Bird — has constructed a story with a deeper meaning for those who choose to read beyond the plot, one that makes the work funnier, sweeter and more profound.

First, the overview: Cuffy "Sportcoat" Lambkin is an elderly African American man, a deacon of the Five Points Church in South Brooklyn that serves a project known as the Cause Houses. On a warm September morning in 1969, Sportcoat, addled by moonshine known as "King Kong," slowly makes his way to a communal courtyard and shoots 19-year-old drug kingpin Deems Clemens in the face.

Clemens loses his ear, but not his memory or his network of toughs. As Clemens recovers at home, Sportcoat’s friends, including Hot Sausage, Dominic Lefleur the Haitian Sensation, Sister Bum-Bum, and a Nation of Islam member named Soup, urge him to flee, leave the neighborhood, the state, the region. “You a walking dead man, Sport,” says Hot Sausage. As Sportcoat makes his agonizingly slow decisions about the situation, McBride raises and lowers the curtains on a community of African American and Latinx characters whose lives and needs intersect constantly.

Clemens isn't the only person with a grudge against Sportcoat; the ladies of Five Points Church believe his late wife, Hettie, absconded with their Christmas Club money (which might amount to $50 or $5,000), and they want it back. Thomas "The Elephant" Elefante, a nearby Mafia don who's better at gardening than serious crime, also materializes when he realizes his father ("the Governor") may have hidden his notorious loot somewhere in the Cause Houses.

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. These men, women and children regard Five Points Church as a beacon and a yardstick even when they have not worshiped there for weeks or decades. But the church is also the Ithaca in McBride's unlikely epic, Sportcoat its even more unlikely Odysseus. Instead of crossing seas and tying himself to a mast, Sportcoat scuttles from one unnoticed location in the projects to another, interacting with friends and threats. Instead of a witch named Circe, our hero must contend with the formidable ghost of Hettie, who remains mum on the location of the Christmas Club funds but is quite chatty on her opinion of how low her husband has fallen.

But Deacon King Kong is not simply a retelling of an ancient epic. McBride revels in constructing a hero’s journey for Sportcoat but that does not mean he relies on typical tropes or traditional endings. If Sportcoat’s finale takes a darker turn, well, it is at least one of his own choosing. There is something to be said for that.

Patrick is the editor, most recently, of “The Books That Changed My Life: Reflections by 100 Authors, Actors, Musicians and Other Remarkable People.” She wrote this for the Washington Post.