Deacon King Kong, by James McBride

This is a hard book for me to sum up my thoughts on, because I know it’s objectively a good, maybe even a great book — the writing is beautiful, it’s a brilliant evocation of time and place — and yet I found it really, really hard to get into.

It’s set in 1969, in a Brooklyn housing project where an elderly, somewhat confused old man (the titular Deacon, although he’s usually called Sportcoat and even that’s not his real name) shoots a young drug dealer. With a rich cast of vividly described characters all reacting to and in different ways affected by this shocking event, the story unspools from there, not in anything like a straightforward narrative but in something more like a colourful human tapestry.

This sounds great, and I think it is, but it somehow took more than half the book for me to really get dug into the story, keep straight who was who, and find any through-line that I could follow to make me interested in how the story would end. I’m pretty sure my reading experience was affected in a major way by the fact that this was a library book and that by the time I started to really care about the characters (probably two-thirds of the way through the book) I was a day away from having to return it. (Library e-books, unlike library paper books, can’t simply be kept late — they will disappear off your device at midnight on the appointed day). So I rushed reading the end of the story, the part where I’d finally gotten interested in the characters, and this probably impacted my enjoyment of the story. Conclusion: very well written book (I picked it up as it was recommended by someone whose taste in books I always trust); just not the right book or the right time to engage my attention.