Tag Archives: Brooklyn

Good, Evil, and Hope: Deacon King Kong

18 Monday Jan 2021

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Review: Deacon King Kong, by James McBride
Riverhead, 2020. 370 pp. $28

Few people even know his real name, because he never uses it. Even the police confuse him with someone else, because he shares a driver’s license with another man, which makes his official record almost untraceable. But to the residence of the Causeway Housing Projects (the Cause) in south Brooklyn, he’s Sportcoat, because of the colorful assortment he wears of that garment.

His finest moment came umpiring the Cause baseball team, now disbanded. These days, the former deacon of Five Ends Baptist Church spends his time high on King Kong, the popular name for a friend’s moonshine, and talks to his late wife, Hettie. Or thinks he does, and nobody can persuade him otherwise.

Except that in summer 1969, Sportcoat shoots Deems, a teenage kingpin of the Cause drug traffic, and his former baseball protégé, at point-blank range. Sportcoat claims not to have understood what he was doing, but nobody believes that, least of all, the police. But he’s the type of character who doesn’t care what anybody thinks, alternately perplexing, amusing, and horrifying everyone else.

From that shooting springs a complicated, finely woven story, involving Five Ends, cheese deliveries, storytelling as an art form, the racism that warps life in the projects, unlikely romances, what constitutes good in the face of so much evil, and how humans dare to hope.

A portion of the Red Hook Houses project, south Brooklyn, as it appeared in 2012 at Lorraine and Henry Streets (courtesy Jim Henderson via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

But I’d be doing Deacon King Kong a disservice if I failed to mention what a rollicking good time the novel is. Pick almost any paragraph, and you’ll find sprawling, delicious sentences like these, oozing with spicy flavor:

Meanwhile Sister Bibb, the voluptuous church organist, who at fifty-five years old was thick-bodied, smooth and brown as a chocolate candy bar, arrived in terrible shape. She was coming off her once-a-year sin jamboree, an all-night, two-fisted, booze-guzzling, swig-faced affair of delicious tongue-in-groove licking and love-smacking with her sometimes boyfriend, Hot Sausage, until Sausage withdrew from the festivities for lack of endurance.

And for those who appreciate snappy dialogue, look no further. What in the Sixties we used to call “rank-outs” or “snaps” appear here in a poetic form guaranteed to prompt laughter. For instance: “But that idiot’s so dumb he lights up a room by leaving it.” Or: “Son, you looks like a character witness for a nightmare.” McBride has a superb ear and inventive pen, which makes the narrative a delightful ride.

For the first two chapters, McBride even goes a little too far, I think, unraveling so many stories within stories, and with such far-ranging flights of verbal fancy, that I worried. I thought reading Deacon King Kong would be like eating an entire tub of caramel pecan ice cream in a half-hour, past my limit. But the narrative settles down somewhat, to the extent that it does, and McBride’s storytelling skills come to the fore.

Every spoonful matters, as details you might have glossed over come back to play important roles. Characters cross paths in natural yet unexpected ways, and points of view transition gracefully from one to other. Sportcoat moves through the novel oblivious to the effect he has on others, the ultimate catalyst — and denies it, if anyone should point it out to him.

Two key themes emerge. One involves how white interpretations of Black life rest on lies that Black people need not — must not — accept, even if they can do nothing else to fulfill themselves. Dignity requires insisting on the truth. Within that, a person finds meaning and hope by taking small actions, even though they won’t change the big picture. That’s all anyone can do.

As historical fiction, the novel gets down to neighborhood level, as in how the influx or departure of certain groups changes the Cause, how the police or certain agencies function differently from the past, or how drugs have taken over, and the horrific damage that follows. That’s what 1969 means here, aside from frequent references to the New York Mets. And though I yield to no one in my love for that team, I do wish McBride had gone a little further. In particular, I’d have liked to hear more about the Vietnam War, for instance, because maybe residents of the Cause had strong feelings about fighting the white man’s war in Southeast Asia.

But Deacon King Kong is a terrific book and a testament to the author’s range and vision.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from bookshop.org, a bookseller that shares its receipts with independent bookstores.

Playing Favorites: The Wartime Sisters

17 Monday Jun 2019

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Review: The Wartime Sisters, by Lynda Cohen Loigman
St. Martins, 2019. 285 pp. $28

Talk about sibling rivalry. From the moment Ruth Kaplan’s younger sister, Millie, first breathes oxygen, the older girl ceases to exist. No one sees her, pays attention, listens, or thinks she has any talents a girl needs. Oh, sure, she’s bright, bookish, and well organized, but since when have those qualities attracted a husband? Not in Brooklyn in the late 1930s, at any rate, when Ruth comes of age, as a serious young woman studying accounting at college. And not so long as thoroughly modern Millie’s around, cheerful, pretty in a way that turns heads, and easygoing.

Do Mama and Papa Kaplan try to balance the rivalry or combat it in any way? On the contrary; they do their best to create and perpetuate it:

Though Ruth’s tiny transgressions were few and far between, they never seemed to escape her mother’s notice. Any misstep Ruth made was a short, shallow wrinkle on an otherwise smooth and pristine tablecloth. Millie’s slipups, by contrast, were like a full glass of burgundy tipped over onto clean white damask. To their mother’s discerning eye, Ruth’s wrinkles were conspicuous. But her sister’s stains were overlooked and hastily covered — anything so that the meal could continue being served.

What a chilly portrait Loigman has created, a premise so simply elegant, with so few moving parts, that there should be no heavy machinery required to create power, poignancy, or depth. Ruth escapes Brooklyn, marrying Arthur, a decent guy, supposedly as dull and plodding as herself, a whiz kid who, in the war years, gets posted to the federal armory in Springfield, Massachusetts, to do weapons research. Millie’s no-good boyfriend, handsome and dashing but worthless to all eyes but hers, marries her and enlists after Pearl Harbor, also leaving behind a young son, Michael.

The Springfield Armory’s experimental workshop, 1923. In the right background, wearing a lab coat, stands John Garand, inventor of the rifle that became standard army issue in World War II (courtesy National Park Service via Wikimedia Commons)

I like this part of the story best. Told in flashback, the narrative shows how the sisters’ estrangement only hardens with time. Kaplan mère is quite a piece of work, vicious and controlling. Love is sweet, she says, but it tastes better with bread, and she preaches to Millie the unalterable fantasy that the girl will marry a fabulously rich man who takes care of all her wants, every single second, smitten by her beauty and charm. My grandmother’s version was, “It’s just as easy to marry a rich girl as a poor one,” which led her to campaign, hard, against my father choosing my mother. So I’m right there with Loigman in all this.

Indeed, when Loigman lets character drive her narrative, which she does until about the halfway point, The Wartime Sisters packs a punch. After that, however, the contrived story takes over. The sibling rivalry, though still essential, gets diluted by the presence of too many other voices, and the narrative descends into predictable melodrama. Loigman might have redeemed this had the sisters confronted one another properly, with a knockdown, drag-out fight that’s been brewing all their lives. Instead, when their obligatory battle arrives, it peters out much too soon — and, even worse, I get the impression that the author has played favorites, tipping the scales. One sister apologizes; one doesn’t, pleading that she wasn’t responsible. Baloney. It takes two to tango.

The prose style reads almost like nonfiction, practically devoid of metaphor. However, I like the dialogue very much, and the author uses it to create short, powerful scenes. The best concern the sisters and, later, Lillian, wife of the commanding officer at the armory, whose upbringing was even more harrowing than theirs and forms a point of comparison. But too many characters seem vacant, whether Ruth’s daughters, the nasty, bigoted busybody wife that probably every military installation must have, or the caricature of Mama Kaplan, a dreadful person with no apparent redeeming features.

Strangely, The Wartime Sisters might have worked had Loigman merely let the sisters slug it out. But once a subplot takes over, the sisters have no chance to get at one another, and the narrative follows the expected route. Ironically, making those extra pieces fit probably demands more work, when filling out the characters already present might have sufficed. It’s too bad; The Wartime Sisters has its moments. I just wish there were more of them.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Lies and More Lies: When the World Was Young

08 Monday Jun 2015

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Review: When the World Was Young, by Elizabeth Gaffney
Random House, 2015. 298 pp. $26

You’d think that V-J Day would bring young Wallace “Wally” Baker a boatload of joy. The war that’s lasted half her life is finally over; her father, a naval officer in the South Pacific, will come home; and maybe the government will end rationing, so that her mother’s chocolate pound cake won’t be such a luxury anymore.

75 Montague Street, Brooklyn Heights, a century-old building (Courtesy Joe Mabel, via Wikimedia Commons).

75 Montague Street, Brooklyn Heights, a century-old building (Courtesy Joe Mabel, via Wikimedia Commons).

But in this moving, beautifully written coming-of-age novel, that day of victory brings Wally heartache, which the adults around her do nothing to assuage, let alone recognize. The grand, ancestral brownstone in Brooklyn Heights, where she lives with her mother and maternal grandparents, offers material comfort, but that’s about all Wally can be thankful for. Stella, her mother, is distant, beautiful, selfish, and neglectful; Wally desperately needs the attention she can never have. To be fair, Stella has suffered tragic losses, including the deaths of a fiancé and a child, and she’s emotionally fragile.

Yet Stella doesn’t entirely realize that her surviving child has a claim on her. And though Wally never wants for good food or clothes or the Wonder Woman comic books she loves, no one in the family sees her as anything but a reflection of themselves. Only when she displeases them do they notice her, usually to punish her for asking questions about secrets they wish to hide, or for speaking her mind. She doesn’t even have a choice about what name she goes by. Wallace is her middle name, inherited from Stella, and Stella refuses to call her any other, as if her daughter were merely a diminutive of herself.

The only adult who cares for Wally is Loretta, the black maid of all work, whose son, Ham, is Wally’s inseparable companion. Wally picks up Ham’s passion for studying ants (an activity with which Gaffney reflects the action, in apt, extended metaphors). More than that, Wally finds in him the affection, praise, shared spirit of adventure, and listener she gets nowhere else. Loretta would be glad to help, but she has white employers to please. She’s not about to answer Wally’s dangerous questions, nor tell her that Ham’s friendship, though genuine, has been sponsored by Stella’s mother in the form of wages. So Loretta does what she can, which is to keep Wally well fed and safe.

The narrative jumps around confusingly in its efforts to stitch the events that precede V-J to that day and its aftermath. Nevertheless, you can see Wally’s slow, insistent progress toward glimpses of ugly truths–race prejudice, adult hypocrisy, betrayals, and class snobbery. Gaffney does a brilliant job filtering Wally’s observations through a painful, endearing, true-to-life naivety that often leads the girl to wild misinterpretations. For instance, she imagines that Mr. Niederman, a mathematician who boards with her family, must be a spy or somehow dangerous. She keeps trying to make what she learns about him fit into her exciting fantasy, missing the more prosaic threat that the reader understands long before she does.

I admire how Gaffney stretches her range with this novel, very different from the sprawling, gritty Metropolis (which I also liked). She shows with When the World Was Young that she can realize subtle scenes on a small stage, a talent I admire. However, like Metropolis, When the World Was Young has its melodramatic moments, which play worse on that smaller stage. Again like its predecessor, When the World Was Young sometimes adopts the knowing tone of portent that I so dislike (“this would be the last time she did blah, blah, blah”), and which undermines the tension rather than heighten it.

But my greatest objection is how the story resolves. Toward the end, three important characters reverse themselves, which I don’t believe, and what’s more, they do it in a twinkling, while the narrative tells the reader how they feel. I wonder whether the author wanted a quick, redemptive finish, instead of staying with the heart-breaking dilemma she’d so carefully crafted.

Still, I recommend When the World Was Young, an excellent novel about the loss of innocence.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.