Deacon King Kong

This latest from National Book Award winner McBride (The Good Lord Bird) offers a snapshot of 1969 Brooklyn, focusing on a housing project called the Cause Houses and the Italian neighborhood that borders it. It’s a lively place peopled by characters named Bum-Bum and Hot Sausage, with the action centered on a good-natured old drunk named Sportcoat (or Deacon King Kong, a nickname derived from his potent drink of choice). In the book’s opening pages, the underemployed and recently widowed Sportcoat shoots a local drug dealer, which provides a springboard for Sportcoat’s life story and the larger story of the Cause Houses. These are dark, changing times: Heroin has crept in, and the segregation that was quietly tolerated for so long becomes a greater factor in the characters’ lives. But McBride tells that story with a light hand and throughout emphasizes a desire for connection, e.g., Sportcoat’s for his dead wife and NYPL lifer Potts’s for Miss Gee, a Cause Houses stalwart. Hard though life is, community binds the characters together.