"Deacon King Kong" by James McBride

This book was chosen by Barack Obama as a favorite read of 2020. Man must have good taste.

Why does 'Sportcoat', the drunk deacon of a church in Brooklyn, shoot Deems, his one-time teenage protege and now the neighbourhood's drug dealer. Set in a housing project in New York in 1969, when the area is changing from predominantly Irish and Italian to  African American from the southern states, and when the old-time dock-side smugglers of cigarettes and white goods are under threat from the new wave of organized crime based around heroin?

This brilliant novel has fantastic characters, many of whom seem to have walked out of the pages of Damon Runyon's Guys and Dolls, like Sportcoat, always talking to his dead wife Hettie, and his pal Hot Sausage, who has intermittent but incredible sex with Sister Bibb the voluptuous church organist, Potts the honest cop, 'the Elephant' bachelor crime lord and his gardening mother, Earl the incompetent enforcer of the drug's gang boss, centenarian Sister Paul, and the Haitian Sensation:

• "Reverend Gee was a handsome, good-natured man who liked a joke, though at the time he was fresh off scandal himself, having recently been spotted over at Silky's Bar on Van Marl Street trying to convert a female subway conductor with boobs the size of Milwaukee." (Ch 1)
• "The funeral director, old white-haired Morris Hurly, whomn everybody called Hurly Girly behind his back because, well ... everybody knew Morris was ... well, he was cheap and talented and always two hours late with the body" (Ch 1)
• "Sister Bibb, the volutptuous church organist ... was coming off her once-a-year sin jamboree, an all-night, two-fisted, booze-guzzling, swig-faced affair of delicious tongue-in-groove licking and love-smacking with her sometimes boyfriend Hot Sausage, until Sausage withdrew from the festivities for lack of endurance." (Ch 1)

The prose is brilliant. My favourite moments came when the author put out an idea and kept elaborating it, often in a single breathless sentence, such as:

• "If your visiting preacher had diabetes and weighed 450 pounds and gorged himself with too much fatback and chicken thighs at the church repast and your congregation needed a man strong enough to help the tractor-trailer-sized wide-body off the toilet seat and out onto the bus back to the Bronx so that somebody could lock up the dang church and go home - why, Sportcoat was your man." (Ch 2) 
• "The young white social worker with bog boobs who couldn't clap on beat and wouldn't have known a salsa rhythm if it were dressed up like an elephant in a bath tub, but whose wide hips moved with the kind of rhythm every man in the Cause could hear a thousand miles away." (Ch 10)

There are also some wonderful similes:

• "To get within sight of the cheese and then to witness the supply run out was akin to experiencing sudden coitus interruptus." (Ch 1)
• "They sounded like a diesel engine trying to crank on a cold October morning." (Ch 10)
• "You looks like a character witness for a nightmare." (Ch 24)

And some brilliant, if sometimes obscure, proverbs:

• "Better to be a fat man in a graveyard than a thin man in a stew." (Ch 10)

And it keeps giving with more magical moments:

• "Why would you do that? That would be the smart thing to do, which you is allergic to." (Ch 17)
• "You get to know a man after you seen his straight and narrow." (Ch 17)
• "Young girls who had once waved at him had matured into unwed drug-addict mothers." (Ch 21)
• "Through the blisters of thought, he saw Elefante watching him." (Ch 21)
• "One of those guys who dies at twenty and is buried at eighty." (Ch 21)
• "At least I ain't got enough wrinkles in my face to hold ten days of rain." (Ch 24)

Brilliant, vibrant, alive. March 2021; 370 pages

This review was written by
the author of Motherdarling