Tuesday, December 21, 2021

Sportcoat the Deacon

Deacon King Kong
Deacon King Kong 



“He felt like a radio tuning in to a new channel, one that was beginning to fuzz into range, slowly coming in clear, proper, the way his Hettie had always wanted him to be. The new feeling humbled him.”   ― James McBride, Deacon King Kong




James McBride’s novel Deacon King Kong is set in a Brooklyn housing project in 1969, soon after the poor but close-knit community has been decimated by the arrival of heroin. The book begins with an act of vigilantism—or maybe it’s just the result of drunkenness: One morning an old widower known as Sportcoat, strengthened by a bootleg liquor called King Kong, steps into the courtyard and shoots a drug dealer in the head. The dealer survives but the aftershocks are enormous. Not only does the shooting invite the police to come sniffing around the project but it kicks off a turf war between drug gangs competing for supremacy.

The remainder of the book tells the story of a wide variety of characters held together by ties to Sportcoat. There’s a running joke in which people ask just what exactly Sportcoat does in his role as a church deacon. He enumerates a list of random odd jobs, calling himself a “holy handyman.” The author has almost as many narrative styles as characters as he shifts from broad, slapstick comedy to shoot and blow violence to nostalgic meditations on New York history. There is even a subplot involving a hidden work of art that was smuggled out of Europe after World War II.

The result was a mixed bag for this reader. I found some of the vignettes exceptionally interesting, but just as I thought the story was beginning to coalesce it fell apart with a character or highlight that just did not work for me. The book fell short of my previous experience with this author in his historical novel about John Brown, The Good Lord Bird, which I would recommend you read instead.


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