James McBride, who won a National Book Award in 2013 for "The Good Lord Bird," sets his latest novel in South Brooklyn's Causeway Housing Project, known as the Cause Houses, in 1969. "Deacon King Kong" is by turns cacophonous, slapstick, violent and meditative; it is both frightening and tender, disillusioned and romantic. Cuffy "Sportcoat" Lambkin, recent widower and deacon of the Five Ends Baptist Church, is usually too intoxicated to recall his own actions; thus, when he shoots Deems Clemens, who commandeers the Cause Houses flagpole for illicit purposes, Sportcoat later insists that, as Clemens' former baseball coach, he just wanted to encourage the man to return to the game.
Much of the gossip, storytelling, plotting and detective work that follows the shooting takes place in or near the Five Ends Baptist Church. Ostensibly, the church serves the housing project; over time, it becomes clear that the church's importance transcends its congregants. In particular, an Irish cop named Potts and an Italian businessman known as "The Elephant" — men unwelcome at best, feared at the worst — find themselves drawn to the church again and again. The Elephant winds up at the Five Ends chasing answers to an inherited riddle; Potts becomes smitten with Sister Gee during his attempts to find Sportcoat.
McBride's prose is rollicking and unpredictable. Glimpsing a trail of ants, the novel halts to take note of the ants' progress, their appetite, their trajectory. Entire life histories appear in single, rambling sentences. The banter among characters is breathtakingly funny; the chains of insults during disagreements become increasingly nonsensical, and the better for it. McBride's older characters often refer to the Southern states they fled to come north — South Carolina, in Sportcoat's case — and they reflect on these journeys in moving, bittersweet passages. If the accumulation of characters occasionally becomes exhausting, McBride rewards readers at the end with surprising revelations.
There is plenty of suspense regarding how Deems Clemens will react once he recovers from the shooting, as well as the way the shooting reverberates throughout the borough. As Miss Izi, a Cause Houses resident, explains: "Everybody's hunting everybody!"
Questions of territory and identity loom over this pocket of Brooklyn, especially when Sportcoat and his best friend, Hot Sausage, reveal that they share the same ID, trading it back and forth on alternating weeks, fully realizing their belief that it doesn't matter who they are. This, along with several menacing characters (Bunch, Joe Peck) are part of the jubilant prose's dark undercurrent. The novel also has room for Potts, gazing at Sister Gee, remembering his grandmother's definition of love: "a kind of discovery of magic."
McBride closes with Sister Gee on the Staten Island Ferry, "dressed for summer pleasure," and the image is imbued with hope.
Jackie Thomas-Kennedy's writing has appeared in Electric Literature, LennyLetter, Narrative, the Millions, Harvard Review and elsewhere. She held a 2014-16 Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University.
Deacon King Kong
By: James McBride.
Publisher: Riverhead Books, 370 pages, $28.
