THENEWYORKER,MARCH2, 2020 67
“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 im-
pulse 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 Thad-
deus Bonaventure Kosciuszko,” and a
stray German shepherd named Don-
ald whose fur turned orange after it
fell into the Gowanus Canal.
And the sentences! The prose radi-
ates a kind of chain-reaction energy.
After some chapters, you feel empa-
thetically exhausted, in the way you
might feel drained by watching an over-
time 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 descrip-
tion of Sportcoat’s youth:
Bad luck seemed to follow the baby wher-
ever 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 be-
came a blues singer named Tampa Red and
recorded the monster hit song “Devil’s Un-
derstanding,” 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 writ-
ers and music intellectuals for his classic blues
hit that was the bedrock of the forty-mil-
lion-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 characteriza-
tions. The cops are bighearted, the mob-
sters are loyal. A character named Joa-
quin Cordero is introduced as “the only
honest numbers runner in Cause
Houses history.” Everyone’s better an-
gels are generously foregrounded. And
this angelic impulse extends to the ac-
tion. 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-sus-
taining 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 his-
tory he has written about before: his
1995 memoir, “The Color of Water,”
was set in the Red Hook housing proj-
ect, where he was raised. And yet Mc-
Bride has described “Deacon King
Kong” as a novel about a church, rather
than about a housing project, and per-
haps that spirit lends an element of
parable to the plot’s occasional unlike-
lihoods, making them seem not sen-
timental or convenient but challeng-
ing. They dare you to accept things
you can’t explain.T
here is, though, another sound in
“Deacon King Kong,” an under-
tone 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 di-
gressive 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, inde-
structible rage,” in a way that casts the
whole novel preceding it in a more
complicated light. The fact that thatlight 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 phenom-
enon 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 possibil-
ity 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 acci-
dent was a page one story, while phony ver-
sions of black and Latino life ruled the Broad-
way 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 invisi-
ble and functioned as local color.In 2016, President Obama awarded
McBride the National Humanities
Medal, for “humanizing the complex-
ities of discussing race in America.”
McBride’s belief that those madden-
ing “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 om-
niscience 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 ser-
vice that story’s momentum, in the
hope that there’s some just reward for
everyone in the end.
We associate tragedies with the op-
eration 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 im-
probably stayed, where a “dead man” is
given a new life—that more closely ex-
presses 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.