Deacon King Kong

Deacon King Kong is James McBride's 2020 novel, the Oprah Book Club pick of that year and the comic-literary novel that established a much larger audience for McBride after The Good Lord Bird (2013, National Book Award). The structural premise is the September 1969 afternoon when Cuffy Lambkin, also known as Sportcoat, the elderly alcoholic deacon at the Five Ends Baptist Church inside the Causeway Houses Brooklyn projects, walks across the project plaza and shoots Deems Clemens (the eighteen-year-old local heroin dealer who Sportcoat has known since Deems was a child) in the face with an old revolver. The novel runs the next several months through approximately twenty characters in the project community as the shooting reorganizes everyone's lives.

McBride's structural method is the patient ensemble construction across the project community (the Five Ends congregation, the Italian-American mob figures who have business with Deems, the elderly Black church ladies who knew Sportcoat's wife Hettie, the white police sergeant assigned to the case) handled in McBride's distinctive comic-literary prose register. The novel reads in the literary tradition that Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, and Colson Whitehead have built and that contemporary American comic-literary fiction rarely commits to at this scale. The Sportcoat-and-Hot-Sausage friendship chapters carry the structural emotional weight. The hidden-treasure subplot (the church's missing Christmas Club money) operates as the structural mystery the novel turns on. The novel's structural argument (that the operational mechanics of a Brooklyn housing project community in 1969 require the same patient literary-realist treatment that the contemporary American novel reserves for white suburban experience) is made through the texture of the daily project life rather than through any direct argument.

Recommended as required contemporary American literary fiction reading, as the right McBride entry point alongside The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store (2023), and as one of the canonical contemporary American comic-literary novels. The Dominic Hoffman audiobook is the definitive audio production. Five stars without reservation.