“Of course the folks in the Cause House had predicted Sportscoat’s death for years,” McBride writes.Īfter the attack, he seems to develop a kind of invisibility shield. What saves Deems is a quick head turn, just before the older man pulls the trigger for Sportscoat, it’s an almost preternatural ability to deflect death. We also see this suspension of reality in the aftermath of the shooting, which both Deems and Sportscoat survive. For one thing, there are the Pynchonesque names - Sportscoat and Hot Sausage the narcotics kingpin Bunch Moon and the mobster Tommy “The Elephant” Elefante, “40, heavyset and handsome,” whose father helped fund and build the Five Ends Baptist Church, where Sportscoat is a deacon. Though sparked by an act of violence, “Deacon King Kong” often spirals into comic riffs and set pieces that suggest there is both more and less at stake.

His 2013 novel “ The Good Lord Bird,” which won the National Book Award for fiction, is set in Kansas in the 1850s, and in its broadly satirical portraits of John Brown, Frederick Douglass and others, it stretches history, rendering it picaresque.

The author of six previous books, McBride has plowed this territory before. The implication is that the world of this narrative is both the one we inhabit and one that is slightly different, a space of imaginative reverie. Lindsay, and Abzug was still a year away from election to the House. “On Manhattan’s Upper West Side, Bella Abzug, the flamboyant Jewish congresswoman, was meeting with fundraisers to consider a run for president.” In reality, Armstrong, along with fellow Apollo 11 astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins, was greeted by Mayor John V. “he Brooklyn Borough President was welcoming Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon,” McBride writes. Like them, he telegraphs his intentions through the use - or better yet, the reinvention - of history, which as “Deacon King Kong” progresses becomes a kind of floating opera, touching but not always overlapping with events as they occurred. But its tinge of absurdity indicates that McBride is operating in the realm of social allegory, a lineage that extends back through generations of writers: Ralph Ellison, Terry Southern, Darius James. It’s a tragicomic moment, marking the way Sportscoat engages (or fails to) with the world.

Deacon king kong by james mcbride