We learn how Hettie, Sportcoat’s deceased wife, was found in the river and the impact her death has left not just on Sportcoat, but the community itself. We learn how Deems, the drug-dealer shot in the opening pages of the novel, left his talent at baseball behind after the death of his grandfather. Everything is connected, from the deacon to the church ladies, cheese, long-dead mafia men and their promises, Jesus, baseball, and the church’s missing Christmas box.Įach character has a story, a history, a nickname, and each character gets time devoted to fleshing them out. As the novel unwinds, following each thread of the people affected by Sportcoat’s actions, it becomes clear that nothing that happens in this community is ever an isolated, random incident. Even the mover for the local Italian mafia hears about it in passing. His friends wonder if the man actually realizes what he’s done. The witnesses wonder why part-time deacon, full-time alcoholic, and usually harmless “Sportcoat” would do such a thing. James McBride’s Deacon King Kong is the story of a Brooklyn deacon who, one September day in 1969, shoots the Cause Houses’ local drug dealer. In Deacon King Kong, McBride brings to vivid life the people affected by the shooting: the victim, the African-American and Latinx residents who witnessed it, the white neighbors, the local cops assigned to investigate, the members of the Five Ends Baptist Church where Sportcoat was deacon, the neighborhood’s Italian mobsters, and Sportcoat himself.” The reasons for this desperate burst of violence and the consequences that spring from it lie at the heart of Deacon King Kong, James McBride’s funny, moving novel and his first since his National Book Award–winning The Good Lord Bird.

38 from his pocket, and, in front of everybody, shoots the project’s drug dealer at point-blank range. Quick Book Summary (from the official blurb): “In September 1969, a fumbling, cranky old church deacon known as Sportcoat shuffles into the courtyard of the Cause Houses housing project in south Brooklyn, pulls a. James McBride’s Deacon King Kong, recent winner of the Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in fiction, is our next selection. In a continuation of our series of micro-reviews, assistant editor Brandon Williams brought together a group of ardent readers to give their quick-hit impressions of recent novels which have won major awards from the literary world.

Deacon King Kong by James McBride