It makes no sense to anyone who knows Sportcoat that the harmless old man would do such a thing. Worse luck for Sportcoat, he succeeds only in taking off part of Deems’s ear, leaving the young man in enraging pain, and poised to exact revenge. Then one day, almost as if possessed, Sportcoat goes to the Cause Houses plaza, walks up to a teen-ager named Deems Clemens, a onetime star of Sportcoat’s youth baseball team who now sells heroin, and shoots him. It is September, 1969, during what will prove a miraculous season for baseball fans in the city, and Sportcoat, seventy-one years of age, is equally in need of divine intervention, as he reels from the death of his wife. King Kong is the name of the home brew he favors. Now he spends his days doing the occasional odd job and, primarily, drinking. He is indeed a deacon, serving at the local Five Ends Baptist Church (though one of the novel’s running jokes is that no one quite knows what a deacon’s duties are, or how a man gets to be one), and he used to be the coach of the Cause’s youth baseball team. “Deacon King Kong” is a nickname on top of a nickname: everyone in the Cause Houses knows the title character as Sportcoat. It’s a world where isolation seems like vanity where one’s intimate business is usually, somehow, everyone else’s business, too where even the attempted murder that begins the novel takes place in front of sixteen witnesses, many of whom know both shooter and victim personally. His new novel, “ Deacon King Kong” (Riverhead), set in what appears to be a fictionalized version of the Brooklyn housing project where McBride grew up, is crowded with characters whose backstories are crowded with more characters, all of their fates connected, in ways they know about and in ways they don’t. Some novels about city life are poems of alienation, interior portraits of the existentially isolate, but James McBride’s vision of New York is one of overwhelming human profusion.

James mcbride deacon king kong