The humor, for all its ontological merits, runs too broad in too many places. He doesn’t just pivot from the humor to the agony he seems to deploy both modes at once, and it speaks to his talents that he does so with dexterous aplomb. Fortunately, it is also deeply felt, beautifully written and profoundly humane McBride’s ability to inhabit his characters’ foibled, all-too-human interiority helps transform a fine book into a great one. Deacon King Kong is many things: a mystery novel, a crime novel, an urban farce, a portrait of a project community. Sportcoat is the vexatious heart of James McBride’s cracking new novel.like something out of Zora Neale Hurston updated by Paul Beatty. Sometimes the most affirmative thing you can do, as a storyteller, is to service that story’s momentum, in the hope that there’s some just reward for everyone in the end. In Deacon King Kong, narrative omniscience leaves room for despair, as it must, but its over-all energy never flags. It’s as if any sentence in the book would, if allowed to flow all the way to its digressive end, empty into the pool of injustices that put these characters in the Cause Houses to begin with. A consciously suppressed anger emerges only rarely, but often enough to make you read the comedy differently. The experience of traversing a simple flashback paragraph is like trying to leap from stone to stone across a river, except occasionally one of them turns out to be not a stone after all but a lily pad, or a shadow, and into the river you go. After some chapters, you feel empathetically exhausted, in the way you might feel drained by watching an overtime football game. And the sentences! The prose radiates a kind of chain-reaction energy. Reading it is like watching a movie in which one’s occasional impulse to ask questions is pleasantly swamped by the need to keep up with the pace of events. The sheer volume of invention in Deacon King Kong-on the level of both character (the first chapter alone introduces twenty individuals by name) and language-commands awe.

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