Deacon King Kong: Our Next Read

We will meet at Zoom's house for our next book club on June 10, at 7 p.m. Hope you are enjoying this novel. I loved it. James McBride's earlier memoir, The Color of Water, was equally outstanding, if you want to learn more about his remarkable upbringing by a white, Jewish mother and his 11 siblings in the Brooklyn projects during the '60s and '70s. 

There's a good chance most of you have either read, or watched the TV series from, his novel, The Good Lord Bible. So good! I also highly recommend the Audible version for DKK.

Here's a wonderful interview with McBride on Fresh Air: Writer James McBride. What impressed me the most about him was his undaunted optimism. (This comes through in Deacon King Kong in a way that reminded me of Peace Like a River. The twining of magical realism, faith, humor and all that hopeful stuff in the face of the most wretched and calamitous circumstances. Curious to hear what others think.)

And then there are the sentences like this one:

And there [the ants] stayed, a sole phenomenon in the Republic of Brooklyn, where cats hollered like people, dogs ate their own feces, aunties chain-smoked and died at age 102, a kid named Spike Lee saw God, the ghosts of the departed Dodgers soaked up all possibility of new hope, and penniless desperation ruled the life of the suckers too black or too poor to leave, while in Manhattan the buses ran on time, the lights never went out, the death of a single white child in a traffic accident was a page one story, while phony versions of black and Latino life ruled the Broadway roost, making white writers rich—West Side Story, Porgy & Bess, Purlie Victorious—and on it went, the whole business of the white man’s reality lumping together like a giant, lopsided snowball, the Great American Myth, the Big Apple, the Big Kahuna, the City That Never Sleeps, while the blacks and Latinos who cleaned the apartments and dragged out the trash and made the music and filled the jails with sorrow slept the sleep of the invisible and functioned as local color.