66 THENEWYORKER,MARCH2, 2020
Centered on a church, McBride’s exuberant story has an air of parable.
BOOKS
IT ALL COMES BACK
Fate and fury in James McBride’s novel “Deacon King Kong.”
BYJONATHAN DEE
ILLUSTRATION BY BENE ROHLMANN
S
ome novels about city life are poems
of alienation, interior portraits of
the existentially isolate, but James Mc-
Bride’s vision of New York is one of
overwhelming human profusion. His
new novel, “Deacon King Kong” (Riv-
erhead), 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 at-
tempted 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 charac-
ter as Sportcoat. He is indeed a dea-
con, 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 ex-
presses a kind of condescending skep-
ticism toward those who try to con-
vince him that he was responsible. The
first two chapters both end by pro-
nouncing 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 hold-
over from back when the neighbor-
hood 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, price-
less bit of wartime plunder from Eu-
rope known as the Venus of Willen-
dorf. 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 satis-
faction comes from seeing those char-
acters, armed with less evidence than
the reader possesses but guided by faith,
close in on their goals, and from watch-
ing Sportcoat—whom a white char-
acter dismisses as the kind of drunk
