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

The novelist examines an inexplicable act of violence, and the tangled threads of the story behind it.
James McBride
Centered on a church, McBride’s exuberant story has an air of parable.Illustration by Bene Rohlmann

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. ♦