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Deacon King Kong by James McBride

                                     




 Published: March 2020

Genre: Fiction

Themes: New York, housing projects, community, human frailty

My rating (out of 5): ❤❤❤❤❤


On the front cover it says that Barack Obama named this book as a favourite read for 2020, and it was also one of Oprah's book club top ten picks of the year, so it is hard to think of any endorsement better than that.  The writing bursts off the page right from the start, and James McBride brings us a good story about a multicultural New York community living in project blocks just opposite the Statue of Liberty.  

The writing has a quick stride to it and characters are introduced as they gather around a flagpole at the base of the apartments.  The flagpole is a magnet for all the residents, and in the morning the older people from Five Ends Baptist church catch up with the latest gossip on one bench, while the local drug dealer politely gives them until mid-day before he starts trading from the bench on the other side in the afternoons.

The Baptist church is the backbone of the community, and their building sits just opposite the harbour where an Italian gangster works from an old boxcar shifting illicit goods under cover of darkness. One man connects all these elements together, and that is Sportscoat, who is a Deacon of the church, living in the apartments and working part-time as gardener for the Italian gangster's aged mother.  Sportscoat is a heavy drinker and his favourite tipple is a local liqour known as King Kong brewed by one of his friends in an adjoining block.  Everyone knows that Sportscoat is a drunk, but he is usually harmless with it and in the past he has done a lot for the community, so everyone usually turns a blind eye.  That is, right up until the day Sportscoat marched through the crowd gathered under the flagpole and tried to put a bullet through the head of Deems the young drug dealer.

The whole community is loud and brash, and many of them give the local police a wide berth because of past misdemeanors, but they look after their own and step in when anyone needs help.  James McBride writes with a real empathy for people who are doing what they can to get by and the humour in the book does not detract from the gritty reality of living on the wrong side of the Hudson river.  The community is based on McBride's own experience of growing up in a Brooklyn housing project and it is the kind of book that could only be written by someone who has experienced that kind of life themselves.

I found the book to be a real page turner and I loved some of the phrases used by the characters such as 'they threw him in the river without instructions'  and 'he had the mental capacity of a full grown pea'.  The style of writing is a bit like Philip Roth's Great American Novel, only not nearly as offensive.
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