Deacon King Kong (Oprah's Book Club): A Novel

The book and narrator are brilliant.

I listened to this in audiobook format. The performance was fantastic.

This novel follows a cast of characters in the late 1960s Brooklyn housing projects, primarily centered around the members of a Baptist church. The title character sets off a whirlwind of a plot when he shoots the neighborhood drug lord in broad daylight. The characters are extremely colorful as is the dialogue, and the plot, though unlikely, is absolutely perfect and satisfying in every way. It took me a while to warm up to the lingo and keep the characters straight, but its worth it for this truly heartwarming story that will leave a smile on your face.

very good writing. about blacks living in housing projects in NY city. relations of blacks to Italians, Jews, Irish. The drug wars...
McBride is very good as "speaking in the language of the protagonists, in this case the blacks.
McBride is an excellent writer but takes on too many issues, just touching on them. he always ties up the end to fit in perfectly and this feels too contrived. I enjoyed reading the book very much,. except for the end/

Ok
A bit too long; too many extraneous characters

A rich and joyous story. So glad to have discovered this writer.

Great story, great writing, great characters, and the *best* names for the characters. Really enjoyed, and the little “magical realism” bits were fine although I don’t usually like that kind of thing.

James McBride's Deacon King Kong is a charming story that manages to be both a light-hearted mystery thriller and a gut-wrenching commentary on life in the projects in greater NYC in the 1960's.

There's a delightful cast of characters to follow around, and the master of ceremonies throughout it all is the Forrest Gump/Chauncey Gardner-like character of Sportcoat, an older resident of the neighborhood who can be single-minded or simple-minded depending on the day. You wouldn't think it at first, but we need more Sportcoats in this world of ours.

“Someone else had already taken over Deems’s bench at the flagpole. Nothing here would change. Life in the Cause would lurch forward as it always did. You worked, slaved, fought off the rats, the mice, the roaches, the ants, the Housing Authority, the cops, the muggers, and now the drug dealers. You lived a life of disappointment and suffering, of too-hot summers and too-cold winters, surviving in apartments with crummy stoves that didn’t work and windows that didn’t open and toilets that didn’t flush and lead paint that flecked off the walls and poisoned your children, living in awful, dreary apartments built to house Italians who came to America to work the docks, which had emptied of boats, ships, tankers, dreams, money, and opportunity the moment the colored and the Latinos arrived. And still New York blamed you for all its problems.”

This is the story of a community in Brooklyn within sight of the Statue of Liberty centered on the activities of main character, Sportcoat, a deacon at the local church. “Sportcoat was a walking genius, a human disaster, a sod, a medical miracle, and the greatest baseball umpire that the Cause Houses had ever seen, in addition to serving as coach and founder of the All-Cause Boys Baseball Team.” The year is 1969.

During one of Sportcoat’s alcoholic binges, he shoots Deems, the local drug dealer. The rest of the narrative tells of the ripple effect through the area. The impact is wide-reaching – the drug network, organized crime, local police, church members, residents, and long-time friends.

The beginning of the book is spent setting up the many threads, and it can seem a bit chaotic. It is sometimes difficult to keep track of the many characters and plot points. But I have read this author before (The Good Lord Bird), so I trusted he would bring it all together and my trust was well-placed.

McBride is skilled at employing humor to offset the anguish of serious topics. For example, a hit man keeps bumbling the hit by way of a variety of bizarre mishaps. There are ongoing jokes about the definition of a deacon, a mysterious supply of cheese, and ants.

McBride has created a community of characters of many races that feel authentic. I cared about what happens to them. The threads of the story converge into a highly engaging experience. I can easily see this book being made into a film.

Like another reader, I too was left wondering things about Sportcoat. Like: what happened to the Christmas fund? I was expecting it to be in the other"palm of God," as Hettie kept telling Sportcoat after her death, when he appeared to her in his moonshine hallucinations. It's like McBride got tired all of a sudden, and just didn't want to make any more effort with that character.
Nevertheless, this was a 4star book, with many carefully crafted characters, made to be loved or hated, living in and around the North East (?) of Brooklyn, in Project Housing ($43/month!), in the late 1960s.
Bad drugs have moved in, thanks to the encouragement of Uncle Sam, to make Black Lives Matter less. A boy growing up to be a baseball star, with the mentoring and coaching of Sportcoat, is now a dealer with a prime spot at the flagpole of his Housing Project. He's ambitious, and thinks he'll do better getting supplied by the Sicilian mob. His current distributor gets word of this, and has plans to nip it in the bud. Thus, a drug war is about to start. At the same time, Sportcoat the Deacon (nicknamed Deacon King Kong for his fondness of the moonshine that goes by that name), is getting pressured by the pastor and congregation of Five Points Baptist Church to produce the $3K claimed to be the amount of the Christmas Club money, that disappeared after Sportcoat's wife Hettie (the treasurer) walked into the harbor. This guy drank so much moonshine, I really don't get how his character could live to 71. Nonetheless, you will finish this book with a smile on your face and a warm feeling in your heart from reading this author's work.

A unique storyline with a great cast of characters. I had high hopes for this book since I loved McBride's memoir "The Color of Water" so much, but I have to admit that this didn't hold my attention quite as much as I was expecting it to. Worth reading though.

Almost fatally overlong, digressive, and rambling, this book was brought to my attention by other reviewers of Colson Whitehead's Harlem Shuffle. But unlike Harlem Shuffle, which despite its faults, presents characters that come across as real, Deacon King Kong presents a whole bunch of stereotypes--most with hearts of gold beneath their various ethic exteriors. There are a lot of good scenes here, but there is no suspense. It's pretty clear early on exactly where the story is going. There are also more than a few loose ends not accounted for. There are a few funny scenes. Somehow, despite being a "feel good" book, it ends up seeming more than a bit hollow.

The audiobook was very well read, however.

I listened to the book in audio, narrated by Dominic Hoffman. His voice was instrumental and had the right tone for the characters. Reading this book took me longer than I anticipated. I put the book down for awhile and it took me a period of time before I picked it back up. It’s not that the book was boring or a difficult read, it was intriguing and funny at times. I had several other books to finish reading, that I wanted to give this one my undivided attention. The characters are colorful and distinct. The names of some of the characters are endearing such as, Hot Sausage, Lightbulb, Pudgy Fingers, Soup, and Elephant. The book is very character driven, and my favorite character was Sister Gee, she was spunky and a no nonsense lady. The Irish, Puerto Rican’s and African American’s got along in the Cause and that was refreshing to read.

The novel is creatively written with a storyline that has mystery, drama, crime and romance. McBride demonstrates himself to be an awesome storyteller, he develops the characters. each with a back story; and connects them to one another in a sense of community pride and faith. There are many artistic symbolism that the author uses to express the state of mind of the characters, such as ants, Jesus's cheese, baseball, and the Christmas club money. All of these things and a few others define the story and the narrative (pokeweed, Jesus juice). The message that McBride intertwined in the story were outstanding showing a snapshot of the community, its diversity, social upheaval and change in Brooklyn, New York around 1969. Again, I love a book with history, and the author did not fail me on this. He referenced the Mayor John Lindsay (real mayor of New York from 1966-73) and Governor Nelson Rockefeller. There was a mention of the riot that broke out in Brownsville, New York after a police officer shot and killed an 11 year black boy. The Gorvino family is a stand in for the real life Gambino family, a notorious organized crime family.

I don't know why I. waited so long to read this novel. I gave it 4 stars. It was an enjoyable read and I have some of McBrides' previous novels that I need to blow the dust off and read, such as Song Yet Sung, The Good Lord Bird, Five-Carat Soul, and Kill 'em and Leave (non-fiction).

Books featuring alcoholics as lead characters inevitably reflect the challenges of a)unreliability, b) the writer and readers' own judgments, and c) to rehab or not to rehab? The incredibly skilled National Book Award winning author James McBride overcomes all obstacles by presenting the heroic titular character as a god in his own realm, a beaten-down Brooklyn housing project known as the Cause. Sportcoat, as he is known, has recently lost his long-suffering wife, whom he still sees and who still chastises him for ruining both their lives. However, within his community, he is known for his good deeds and for his ability to fix anything. He's got a past with many of the outstandingly drawn residents such as Sister Gee, his best friend Hot Sausage, and had been an inspiration to young Deems, a former baseball prodigy now turned drug dealer. To set the plot in motion, Sportcoat shoots Deems at the project's central beating heart courtyard, a brazen and shocking act witnessed by many residents. Tumbling along after are plot branches involving the Five Ends Baptist Church, a retiring cop, and a lonely Italian neighbor and his mother. Nothing in this novel goes awry, and the unpeeling of the layers and the rousing and touching conclusion make this a book for the ages, and in skilled hands, it could be another TV show on the level of The Wire, if not better. All the elements are here.

James McBride’s novel Deacon King Kong is set in a Brooklyn housing project in 1969, soon after the poor but close-knit community has been decimated by the arrival of heroin. The book begins with an act of vigilantism—or maybe it’s just the result of drunkenness: One morning an old widower known as Sportcoat, strengthened by a bootleg liquor called King Kong, steps into the courtyard and shoots a drug dealer in the head. The dealer survives but the aftershocks are enormous. Not only does the shooting invite the police to come sniffing around the project but it kicks off a turf war between drug gangs competing for supremacy.

The remainder of the book tells the story of a wide variety of characters held together by ties to Sportcoat. There’s a running joke in which people ask just what exactly Sportcoat does in his role as a church deacon. He enumerates a list of random odd jobs, calling himself a “holy handyman.” The author has almost as many narrative styles as characters as he shifts from broad, slapstick comedy to shoot and blow violence to nostalgic meditations on New York history. There is even a subplot involving a hidden work of art that was smuggled out of Europe after World War II.

The result was a mixed bag for this reader. I found some of the vignettes exceptionally interesting, but just as I thought the story was beginning to coalesce it fell apart with a character or highlight that just did not work for me. The book fell short of my previous experience with this author in his historical novel about John Brown, The Good Lord Bird, which I would recommend you read instead.

Wonderful fable

Deacon King Kong is a bit Brooklyn Fairytale, a bit of crime/whodunnit novel and part sweet character development. James McBride brings some of these characters fully to life, and some are left quite hazy. By the time you finish the last page you feel great affection Sportcoat, aka Deacon King Kong, aka Cuffy Lampkin, you are rooting for Sister Gee, who is on the brink of finding love after a life of cleaning up other people's messes. You are rooting for Officer Potts, the son of Irish immigrants and an NYPD officer on the verge of retirement. You hope that Elefante, a small-tim
e mobster wanting to retreat to a life outside the Italian mafia, finds a way to do that. You hope that Deems, the local drug dealer who before discovering the profits of selling drugs was gifted baseball pitcher, also finds a way to happiness beyond the turf battles over drugs that are beginning to grip Brooklyn public housing projects. The book features a dizzying array of colorful characters, all striving for comfort and a better life. There are so many characters, in fact, that one feels the need to diagram them all out. But at the core of this story is the importance of a caring community, of friendships, of living by the Golden Rule and getting by despite tough circumstances. Deacon King Kong is a colorful, very lively and endearing tale of redemption, and a slice of life lived to the best of these characters' abilities. McBride took a very different path with this novel, so very different from his prior (and great) efforts, and yet Deacon King Kong, like its title character, does not disappoint.

A Lost World in Brooklyn

James McBride’s Deacon King Kong feels like a paean to community lost forever in time. In interviews, he’s cited 1969, the period of the novel, as a sort of transitional time, after the assassination of MLK and the advent of large scale criminal drug operations in New York’s housing projects. The world he creates, while not glossing over the extreme poverty and municipal neglect of housing projects once build for Italians and other immigrant groups, seems to express a palpable sadness over losing the tight knit quality of his fictional Causeway Housing located in Brooklyn. McBride himself grew up in the Red Hook Houses, a massive group of intermediate height buildings erected in the 1930s and first occupied by what at the time were called the “worthy poor.” In his novel, Italians, Puerto Ricans, and African Americans still live together in and around the Causeway Houses, and as the novel progresses we discover that even as the area changed, some people were able to see beyond color enough to work together, at least on occasion. So we have a collection of interesting Runyonesque characters right down to names and distinctive syntax that sounds almost like Runyonese. In McBride’s skillful hands, it all adds up to a delightful reading experience that blends character, history, and suspense in a pleasing package.

The novel opens with Deacon Cuffy Lambkin, the Deacon King Kong of the title for his heavy consumption of his pal’s corn liquor, arguing with his dead wife Hettie and moving on to shoot Deems Clemens, a nineteen year old heroin dealer. He and Deems have a history. Sportcoat, as he is also known, for his flamboyant sports coats, taught Deems in Sunday school and served as his baseball coach. He was convinced Deems would make it to the majors, but Deems went for the fast money selling drugs. The shooting turns Sportcoat into a marked man, though finding him proves a very humorous challenge, as he roams around the projects in search of Christmas club money collected and hidden by Hettie before her death. In addition, other intrigues spin around the projects, with Bunch Moon paranoid about rivals cutting into his drug dealing empire, Joe Peck, in the employ of the Italian mob, angling for the territory, and Tom Elefante working at maintaining his independence as a small time transferrer of smuggled good from his boxcar located on the East River within shouting distance of the projects. All these characters are interconnected. How becomes evident as Elefante seeks a missing and reputedly valuable little sculpture spirited out of German after WWII and entrusted to his father by an Irish gangster in the Bronx now on his deathbed. How all these characters, and several others, come to understand their interdependence makes up the crux of the novel, a tale wove together with plenty of good humor by McBride. It’s not too much to reveal that everything works itself out in the end with the characters of good heart having their wishes fulfilled in the end. Dire and rough as these characters’ lives are, McBride leaves your feeling that they process a spirit and zest that often feels missing in modern life.

If you’re looking for a novel in which you can lose yourself for a few hours, one that illustrates without preaching about the importance of community and relationships, and that demonstrates every human life has value and each can enrich the other, you won’t go wrong with McBride’s very good Deacon King Kong.

Excellent book. Loved all the people even though so many were written as stereotypes of their cultures.

I really liked some components of this story and really disliked others.

What I liked:
the characters--their weaknesses and strengths
the concept of how one act can affect a community

both of these were incredibly interesting to me

What I disliked:
some parts made the book longer than it needed to be--ex: the drug dealing components. while important, of course, sometimes it made the book lose its pace.

This book is a real treat. It is funny, warm and humane. In the end, everyone gets their just due and it feels right. I will be looking for more books by James McBride.

Deacon King Kong is an amazing book. After reading the first chapter I was not sure I was going to continue, could not keep track of the characters with names like Sportcoat and Hot Sausage. Nevertheless I plowed on and was richly rewarded. James McBride invited me into the world of Five Ends, an area of Brooklyn, population consisted mostly African Americans and public housing. I became invested in all the characters, with all their nuances, humor and real struggles. I liked the way the lives of the different characters intersected. Most will stay in my mind forever.

I wasn't sure I would like this but I did. It was a taste of my old Brooklyn, a meeting with some great characters who grew on me and some magical realism. We discussed in book club and I think everybody liked it.

What a wonderful novel! McBride has written a wild ride of a story, plotted like a farce and full of comic but dignified characters, that is both a tragedy and a comedy; I don't really want to say more than that but I should say that some of the wildest and most disparate plot threads come together in. logical and almost foreseeable climax. I enjoyed every minute of this novel.

A raucous story of mostly Black people in a housing projects neighborhood in Brooklyn. It was hard for me to get into it and keep track of all the characters and figure any story other than day to day troubles for the first half of the book, but in the last half the characters took on meaning and the story developed.

This is a difficult book to review. I found the first half a definite struggle, put it down so frequently that I finished 8 books before getting to the point where I cared about Sportcoat and his friends. The second half of the novel was sweet, humorous, and provided some conclusions. But I’m not sure I’d recommend anyone else put in this much labor!
I’d rate the first half one star, second half four.

The story begins in 1969 when an elderly alcoholic named Sportcoat stumbles into the central plaza of a Brooklyn housing project and shoots a drug dealer. What follows is just the kind of novel we all need right now, a crowded and good-hearted romp through difficult circumstances and challenging times. Peopled with the residents of the Cause, the members of the Five Ends Baptist Church, some Italian gangsters and a lovelorn Irish cop, this novel has several plot lines involving dozens of characters and yet manages to make all of them come to life. There's real heart in this book, even as it never looks away from the challenges they all face or of the way their small piece of New York is changing forever.

And through it all goes Sportcoat, always looking for his next drink, haunted by the ghost of his wife and never quite understanding what all the fuss is about.

Now this is an acceptable NYC novel for me. It's a piece in time in 1960's Brooklyn, with a vast cast of real characters, living, fighting, loving. It looks big, but moves quick. I did miss the best feature of 'The Good Lord Bird', the unique writing style,but obviously it wouldn't work for 1960s New York. I feel like each chapter mainly featured a conversation with two people that sometimes went on too long. The book is full of heart and I wanted more of the lives of these great characters, rather than their conversations. I especially would have liked more backstory from The Elephant's mom who liked to rescue plants from empty lots. I wonder if McBride will write a sequel? If you liked this book, try 'The Turner House' by Angela Flournoy or 'The House of Broken Angels' by Luis Alberto Urrea.

In the 1960s Brooklyn’s Cause Houses, part of New York City’s public housing network, became overrun with drug traffic. Younger residents see dealing as their only economic option. Older residents, mostly African American, remember a time when people pulled together to build community and get through economic hardship. The book opens with the elderly Sportcoat firing a gun at the dealer Deems, an incomprehensible act seeing as Sportcoat was once Deems’ baseball coach. But Sportcoat had been drinking heavily and was barely aware of what he’d done. This event exposes the community’s fragile relationship with the police and their closest neighbors, Italian immigrants making their living through dubious business interests.

But the shooting is not at the center of the story; it is simply the catalyst for a complicated series of events that wander, twist, and turn every which way before coming together. Along the way readers become better acquainted with Sportcoat and several members of Five Ends Church, Deems and his gang, the Italian “businessman” Tom Elefante, and police officer Kevin Potts. Sportcoat is trying to find some church money that has gone missing. Deems is trying to build his “empire.” Elefante is trying to help his father’s former associate locate a valuable object hidden away before his death. Nearly everyone is breaking the law right and left, but you can't help pulling for them, hoping that just this once someone will get a lucky break. While I thought the novel bogged down a little bit in the middle, once the threads began to connect the pace picked up and led to a poignant yet satisfying ending.

Not all that great.

This book is like a Guy Ritchie movie (Snatch or Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels) except set in Brooklyn in the 1960s with a focus on race issues. It has a hapless hero who escapes a lot of danger through sheer luck, incompetent bad guys who can't get rid of the hapless hero, and a series of ridiculous coincidences that connect a bunch of different people together to make some impossibly good things happen to the people who deserve it most (and like a Guy Ritchie movie, I struggle to call them "good guys" because there are lots of moral shades of grey). Parts of it are hilarious, but there's a constant undertone of social commentary about the difficulties of being Black in America. It's ultimately a charming story about the power of community and the importance of looking out for one another.