Recent Reviews
Deacon King Kong by James McBride
James McBride’s compelling new novel Deacon King Kong feels like a sociological study merged with a heartbreaking and hopeful saga. His colorful cast of characters which include Sportcoat, Hot Sausage, Deems, Pudgy Fingers, Elephant, and Bean, provide poignant perspectives of African-Americans living in a NYC housing project in 1969. The novel entertains while illustrating the effects of persistent and systemic racism. Though many characters engage in ugly acts of violence, the story elicits empathy as we learn about each characters’ backstory and life circumstances.
In the first paragraph, seventy-one-year-old Cuffy Lamkin, known as Sportcoat, has shot nineteen-year-old drug dealer Deems Clemens, another Causeway Housing Project resident. Everyone in the Cause knows Sportcoat, a well-liked church deacon who is often drunk on King Kong, a homemade brew. They also know Deems, a talented young man who has been sucked into dealing drugs. But why did Sportcoat shoot Deems? It took me several chapters to discern McBride’s intent as the narrator’s tone initially seems unaffected and whimsical. Yet, soon, the book’s more profound aim becomes evident. Yes, levity and laughter grace these pages, but within a broader context of suffering and sorrow. The book delivers a compassionate account of the Cause residents, the local gangsters who control the drug trade, and the cynical police who lack understanding or power to change the situation.
As the narration unfolds, the history of Sportcoat and Deems and the other characters is revealed. The story speaks to their complicated lives of poverty, loss and alienation. Many residents, like Sportcoat, crack under stress. Others like Deems scratch out a living while their dreams diminish by the day. This unjust housing system allows people to live in wretched conditions. Fortunately, the presence of the Five Ways Church enables Cause residents moments of joy, love and connection. But drugs, liquor and violence haunt this housing project. The narrator states, “And now heroin was here to make their children slaves again, to a useless white powder.” With cruel irony, the Cause residents glimpse views of the Statue of Liberty in the distance.
As more violence ensues, a crowd gathers to hear Sister Gee, the pastor’s wife, give an update. McBride’s fury is felt, “They stared at her with that look, that projects look: the sadness, the suspicion, the weariness, the knowledge that came from living a special misery in a world of misery. Four of their number were down -gone, changed forever, dead or not, it doesn’t matter. And there would be more. The drugs, big drugs, heroin were here. Nothing could stop it. They knew that now. Someone else had already taken over Deems’s bench at the flagpole. Nothing here would change. Life in the Cause would lurch forward as it always did. You worked, slaved, fought off the rats, the mice, the roaches, the ants, the Housing Authority, the cops, the muggers, and now the drug dealers. You lived a life of disappointment and suffering, of too-hot summers and too-cold winters, surviving in apartments with crummy stoves that didn’t work and windows that didn’t open and toilets that didn’t flush and lead paint that flecked off the walls and poisoned your children, living in awful, dreary apartments built to house Italians who came to America to work the docks, which had emptied of boats, ships, tankers, dreams, money, and opportunity the moment the colored and the Latinos arrived. And still, New York blamed you for all its problems.”
Miraculously, Deacon King Kong ends with a modicum of hope and happiness. And while James McBride’s celebrates the resiliency of the human spirit, the novel is also a searing indictment of the persistent racism that unjustly torments our fellow citizens.
This is Happiness by Niall Williams
This is Happiness by Niall Williams is a magnificent novel and a perfect book to read during this pandemic. Williams’s narrative transports us to a simpler and more tranquil time. He tenderly captures the lives of people living in the small village of Faha in western Ireland. The story takes place in the 1950s, just as the parish is going to receive electricity. William’s book is one of the most meaningful I’ve read this year. You can feel yourself on the western coast of Ireland looking up at the stars. “Faha was where, when darkness fell, it fell absolutely, and when you went outside the wind sometimes drew apart the clouds and you stood in the revelation of so many stars you could not credit the wonder and felt smaller in body as your soul felt enormous.”
The book is narrated by Noel (Noe) Crowe, an older man, as he recalls the year he lived with his grandparents in Faha. Noe was seventeen then, and he recollects the dramatic months when workers erected poles that would carry electricity to the village. One electric worker named Christy McMahon had lived with Noe and his grandparents while working on the electrification. Christy specifically sought this assignment in Faha. Five decades ago, he had left his bride, Annie Mooney, at the altar on the day they were to be married. Christy felt haunted by his abandonment and hoped Annie would forgive him. He told Noe that he had loved her, but he became afraid his love “would swallow me up.” So at sixty years old, Christy had returned to Faha time to right the mistake he made.
The time Christy and Noe spent had a profound effect on Noe’s understanding of people’s complexity. Christy had told the young Noe, “Some of the things you do when you’re young are unforgivable to you when you’re old.” And Noe concluded from watching Christy wrestle with his choice of fifty years ago that “an older person must accommodate the younger one inside them.”
In lyrical language, Williams describes the presence of music, the ubiquity of rain, and the various religious perspectives of the Faha villagers. He illuminates the power of storytelling to pass the time and dissolve the darkness, especially in the days before electricity. Quirky and earnest characters grace the pages. On one level, the book might be perceived as a tale with sparse action, and yet it is an intricate exploration of universal emotional themes. The book is nostalgic without being maudlin, insightful without being moralistic. This is Happiness is compassionate and profound. It is an ode to the miracle and mystery of being alive. The village of pre-electricity Faha no longer exists, but thanks to William’s beautiful prose and enchanting storytelling skills, this time and place and live on. 5/5
Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi
This review was published in the San Francisco Examiner on September 28, 2020.
https://www.sfexaminer.com/entertainment/yaa-gyasis-transcendent-kingdom-is-masterful/
Yaa Gyasi’s new novel, ‘Transcendent Kingdom,’ is itself transcendent. Tragedy coexists with hope. Hope exists only due to the astonishing intelligence and determination of the main character. The book tells the story of an immigrant family from Ghana. It is also an absorbing rumination on the role of science, religion, racism, addiction, depression, and spirituality in shaping human lives. Gyasi’s breathtaking 2016 debut novel, ‘Homegoing,’ described the effects of the slave trade in America and Ghana on two sisters’ descendants over three hundred years. In ‘Transcendent Kingdom,’ Gyasi’s focus is less the arc of history and more the mysteries of the psyche.
The narrator is Gifty, a PhD candidate in neuroscience at Stanford University School of Medicine. Like many who come to California, she carries the hopes and fears of another place - in her case, two: the Alabama of her childhood and the Ghana her parents had left behind. She says, “I’d come to California because I wanted to get lost, to find.” The novel begins as Gifty’s troubled mother arrives at SFO. Hopelessness haunts her. She burrows into Gifty’s bed and stays there for weeks. Her physical presence in Gifty’s life shapes the story.
At Stanford, Gifty studies mice to identify the neural mechanisms of risk and reward in decision making. Such a discovery could help scientists learn more about depression and drug addiction. Her interest in this topic is not random. Gifty’s beloved older brother, Nana, had died of an overdose when Gifty was eleven. This was the trigger of her mother’s descent into deep depression. Even before these calamities, Gifty’s father had abandoned them and retreated to Ghana. He refused to accept the constant humiliations inflicted on black men in America.
Life in Alabama had not been easy. The family had been poor. And each family member had dealt with the bigotry and discrimination differently. Gifty’s father fled. Gifty’s mother found strength in God and prayer in paradoxically, a white Pentecostal church. The power of her faith allowed her to bear the racist insults of the elderly white man for whom she cared. For Gifty, too, the church provided comfort and meaning. She read the Bible, wrote to God, and chose baptism.
When Nana became a celebrated basketball player, the congregation prayed for his success. But that support proved fleeting. After Nana was injured, a careless doctor prescribed OxyContin for his pain. Addiction followed. Soon the veneer of congregational kindness gave way to judgment and shaming. Gifty felt the sting of a congregant’s disdain: “Their kind does seem to have a taste for drugs.” Gifty combatted the pervasive prejudice with her sharp intellect and a fierce desire to be good. She knew it wouldn’t be enough to endure the racial epitaphs, “I would always have something to prove and that nothing but blazing brilliance would be enough to prove it.”
The novel’s power derives not just from its beautiful prose, but its emotional intimacy. Gifty deciphers her family’s tragedies and ponders her relationship with her brave, but broken mother. Gifty’s story is a journey of reflection and healing. Though she has turned to science, she craves the comfort of her childhood faith. She painstakingly searches for the causes of her brother’s fatal addiction and her mother’s complete collapse. Having witnessed so much bigotry, Gifty comes to believe that internalized racism causes toxic physiological and psychological harm.
The novel is the meditation of a gifted young woman laboring to make sense of what has been a harrowing passage to adulthood. Though she seems to be on a “successful” path, she recognizes the high price she and her family have paid. Gifty’s emotional scars cut deep as she carries the pain of her family’s suffering. Yet, by the end of the book, she has healed enough to make a new start. Yaa Gyasi’s ‘Transcendent Kingdom’ allows us to witness the bittersweet peace that comes from her hard-won understanding.
