Sugar Street

by Jonathan Dee

Publishing for the first time with Grove Atlantic, Pulitzer Prize finalist and celebrated author of seven novels Jonathan Dee delivers a daring, tense, ticking time bomb of a novel about an anonymous white man on the run from his own identity.

“This propulsive and furious book is as fun to read as it is relentless and unsparing. Deranged and faltering America, Jonathan Dee has your number.” —Joshua Ferris, author of The Dinner Party

In Jonathan Dee’s elegant and explosive new novel, Sugar Street, an unnamed male narrator has hit the road. Rid of any possible identifiers, his possessions amount to $168,548 in cash stashed in an envelope under his car seat. Vigilantly avoiding security cameras, he drives until he hits a city where his past is unlikely to track him down, and finds a room to rent from a less-than-stable landlady whose need for money outweighs her desire to ask questions. He seems to have escaped his former self. But can he?

In a story that moves with swift dark humor and insight, Dee takes us through his narrator’s attempt to disavow his former life of privilege and enter a blameless new existence. Having opted out of his material possessions and human connections, the pillars of his new self - simplicity, kindness, above all invisibility - grow shakier as he butts up against the daily lives of his neighbors in their politically divided working-class city. With the suspense of a crime thriller and the grace of our best literary fiction, Dee unspools the details of our unlikely hero’s former life and his developing new one in a drumbeat roll up to a shocking final act.

Dee has been compared by the Wall Street Journal to authors such as Jonathan Franzen and Jennifer Egan for his expansive, contemporary, social novels; Sugar Street is a leaner, more personal, but still uncannily timely look at the volatile America of today. A risky, engrossing and surprisingly visceral story about a white man trying to escape his own troubling footprint and start his life over.

Genres: Fiction, Literary Fiction, Crime, Contemporary, Novels, Noir, Mystery

208 pages, Hardcover

First published September 13, 2022

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.

Jonathan Dee is the author of six novels. He is a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine, a frequent contributor to Harper's, and a former senior editor of The Paris Review. He teaches in the graduate writing programs at Columbia University and the New School.

Reviews

[Elyse Walters · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Because it is my name! Because I cannot have another in my life! Because I lie and I sign myself to lies.
Because I am not worth the dust on the feet of them that hang!”
— a quote from Arthur Miller’s novel, The Crucible;

Another Arthur Miller quote from ‘The Crucible’…..
“I do not judge you. The magistrate sits in your heart that judges you. I never thought you but a good man, John - only somewhere bewildered”

Why the Author Miller quotes?
They spoke to me — as they might other readers too — in association with Jonathan Dee’s new novel, “Sugar Street”.

In “Sugar Street”, we meet an unlikely hero….(our ‘no-name narrator/protagonist)….
…..[Heroes in quasi-medieval hierarchies can be defined by their bravery, strength, loyalty, courage, selfless deeds and defense of the common man]……

With Jonathan Dee’s ‘Sugar Street’ hero? anti-hero? (readers can decide)….we take a very addictive short journey with a white man—whose daily needs are threadbare minimal. He has gotten rid of his cell phone. He cut up his drivers license. He is living under the radar, off the grid so to speak. He has no identification on him. He’s hit the road with a large stash of cash -either hidden under his car seat - or later under a futon in a room he rents on ‘Sugar Street’.

KUDOS—KUDOS- KUDOS ….to the person who wrote the blurb for this book — it’s perfect - telling enough readers need to know without giving away the juicy fun page turning details.
So — I’ll try to follow suit by not giving away spoiler details about the other characters: [kickass tattooed landlord, Autumn]
or the distinctive seasons….
or the school children from Wysocki middle school,
or the pint size door-to-door candy seller,
or witty dialogue intrigue,
or my personal thoughts about the psychology of intolerance, moral, social, and political divide quandaries,
or….the PLAN….of our man……
or…..our man’s former life…
or….the “DRUMBEAT ROLL UP TO A SHOCKING FINAL ACT”!!!

“Sugar Street” is an awesome entertaining contemporary novel.
…..the writing is razor sharp… stabbing, shooting, stinging —certified compelling sentences….with bouts of hilariously dark humor and inquisitive perplexities….
……stirring provocative thoughts!

Where Dee notably spurned portraits of greed in “The Privileges”…. examining the American dream…..(excessive wealth and success)….
in ‘Sugar Street’ we look at abstemiousness, frugal, self-denying, sparing purposes ….
The two books together make perfect bookends.

“Sugar Street” TOTALLY ROCKS….
Not a hesitant bone in my body to recommend this book to everyone!

Note….
I could have chosen dozen of excerpts to share ….(tempting) ….
but they were all so fun to discover myself — I’m holding back…
I leave only one tiny excerpt — (a little something to think about)…….

“There’s THINGS in me I don’t talk about, and then there’s things in me I don’t know about. We’re moving into the latter realm now. Truths will be revealed. Desperation is here. Hunger, fear, things like that, things I’ve never had to face before, not in this open-ended way”.

This literary fiction novel won’t be published until Sept.
— but being such a Jonathan Dee fan….I just couldn’t hold off reading it —
Thank you Grove Atlantic…. Netgalley ….and Jonathan Dee

[Tooter · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 Stars

[Kasa Cotugno · Rating 5 out of 5]

He destroys his license by driving over it, avoids interstates because of (?) cameras tracking plates, won't even eat at a Burger King or stay at a Motel 6 as he escapes eastward. That's all we really know about this narrator who systematically shreds his past and tries to forge a new life deliberately setting himself in a situation so restrictive that anything more and it would be a maximum security prison. What follows is a dissection of white privilege, a theme that Jonathan Dee has pursued in the past but which really hits its stride in this enormously entertaining, frustrating and powerful novel. His backlife is unspooled ever so slowly, and the resolution (if it can be called that) made my jaw drop. Highly recommend. Thank you, Grove Atlantic, for the chance to read this early.

[Leftbanker · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is such an odd little book that it made me paranoid. I picked it up without knowing anything about the author and very little about the book except that a man is on the run and has $168,548.00 in cash in an envelope. Perhaps my living status added to the paranoia I felt reading the book, mostly on a very long (2.5 hours) local train that made twenty-five stops, each one preceded by a recorded message in Spanish and Catalan warning passengers not to get their foot stuck between the train and the platform while exiting. Spoiler Alert: I got my foot stuck between the train and the platform while exiting.

The unnamed narrator was a total head case and paranoid beyond belief, but anyone who takes a second to think about our digitized society will be thoroughly creeped out by so many things we simply accept without objection. My supermarket asks for my customer card with every single purchase I make. I don’t have a card. I shared one a while back but when we split, she kept the card, and I opted out of getting one for myself. You get a slight discount after a shit-ton of purchases, a discount I never used because it was something like 5€ off with a purchase over 50€.

The supermarket is on the ground floor of my building so I shop there 4-5 times a week and have never spent anywhere near 50€ at one time. It creeps me out that they are keeping a record of everything I buy. I worry that I’ll be paying for my shopping and an alarm will sound telling me that I’ve hit dangerous levels of pork or red wine consumption for the month. I don’t need that sort of judgmental bullshit.

This is only one example of data mining and not nearly as terrifying as several others I can think of right off the top of my head. I can’t imagine that there’s a person on the planet who wouldn’t object to having their internet history made public. And before that happens, I need to point out in my defense that the possum suit I was looking at online was for a Halloween costume and not a weird furry orgy that you’ll also find under my recent internet searches.

I loved the idea of the book, but I really don’t think the author pulled if off. The epilogue which he calls “My Manifesto” falls short and wasn’t the knockout punch I was expecting at the end of this short novel. It came across to me as a hastily scribbled editorial. What he had against the military guy was a mystery to me, like every guy in uniform is some sort of fascist?

I was let down by a couple things in the book, like the whole bit about where the money went, and just what the hell he was doing with the immigrant kids. I just didn’t find those parts to be compelling or revealing. I rate this five stars simply because it is so much better than the last piece-of-shit thriller I plowed through.

[Jill · Rating 5 out of 5]

“No one knows who I am, what I am, so I couldn’t be judged, except on the quality of my observations…”

There is a mad – and sometimes, maddening – brilliance to Sugar Street, which submerges the reader into the mind of a nameless, quite possibly insane, white male narrator who is running from…something.

He is guilty of white privilege. Or of a specific crime that resulted in murder. Or maybe embezzlement. Or maybe none of the above. We know that he is fleeing his former life and in doing so, is shedding all the trappings that add up to an identity. The only thing he has with him is an envelope of substantial cash that should keep him going for a couple of years.

Our narrator discards all personal ID, avoids any kind of surveillance including Internet and chain store cameras, and strips himself down to the bare minimum – a ramshackle room in a run-down house on Sugar Street in a working-class city, owned by a tattooed landlady with issues of her own.

As he attempts to reboot – or more accurately, eschew – his life, he is haunted by questions: “What is my role in the world? What is my place? What a white question, to assume or even imagine I have one.” For him, the very idea of flight from his identity is laughable. Still, he pushes forward, striving to be blameless, to lighten his footprint, to escape surveillance, both targeted or not.

Still, it is human nature to strive for connection, and his attempts to engage – while not REALLY engaging – with the immigrant school children who pass by his window raises the question of who really is invisible in society and who is just playing the game.

What Jonathan Dee does so well is to keep both the protagonist and the reader in the dark about who this man really is and what he is capable of doing. When the veil of anonymity is lifted, there is crushing recognition that by making our lives smaller, we don’t necessarily make our own proportional values greater. A huge thank you to Grove Press for providing me with an advance reader’s copy of this highly atmospheric book in exchange for an honest review.

[Laura Rogers · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sugar Street is a strange little book. I imagine our narrator sitting in his cushy office staring at his computer screen when suddenly he pushes back and thinks, "If I stay here one more minute I'll go crazy" or maybe he already is. So, with little forethought, he steals $168,548 and takes off cross-country obsessively staying off the grid as though he is on the FBI's most wanted list. I imagine he saw no other choice but did he really think that $168, 548 was going to last him forever, no matter how frugal? Well, unless that future is foreshortened.

Social and political issues are woven through out, without much upside. The ending is either brilliant or nonsensical. Honestly, I feel a bit heavier and perhaps a tiny bit paranoid having read it. My guess is it's what Jonathan Dee was aiming for.

I received a drc from the publisher via Netgalley.

[Eddie TG · Rating 2 out of 5]

I appreciate Dee’s undertaking of a cumbersome challenge to write from extreme perspectives to create an interesting novel concept. The off-the-grid living, unreliable narrator, and political tones offer a lot to the reader. Unfortunately, the execution (plot, character, and world building) didn’t do it for me.

[Larry Massaro · Rating 5 out of 5]

Probably all of us, during stressful periods, have fantasized about running away from our lives—quitting jobs, quitting family and friends, living simply, cutting up credit cards, ditching smartphones and computers, going off-grid, going on the lam, playing Thoreau. It’s funny, these days, that so many of my daydreams along these lines are obviously triggered by spreads in home magazines and L. L. Bean catalogues: in these reveries I’m alone, semi-napping in a cushy bentwood armchair, with a dog at my feet in a little cabin with a roaring fire in winter woods. This is HGTV escapism, powerful even when we know that underneath it’s just consumerism and real-estate envy. But when I was working and the job was annoying me, I used to fantasize a more specific, more eccentric, and somewhat more spartan plan. I imagined I had moved to Wyoming—a place I’ve never actually been—stocking shelves in a run-down rural IGA supermarket, living in a forlorn little apartment above a package store, a stranger in a shabby, remote, dead-end town, lost between mountains. In my daydreams, deliberate, misanthropic, western lonesomeness made me happy.

The narrator in Sugar Street, Jonathan Dee's new novel, has done something like this. We don’t know his name, either the one he’s abandoned—the one on his shredded driver’s license—or his new alias, and we don’t entirely know, until the very end of the book, why he’s jettisoned his old life. He moves to a small, poor, rusted-out, dilapidated, hope-abandoned city where he’s never been and has no connections. His choice, he thinks, is scrupulously random. But—his quotations from Thoreau notwithstanding—it was essential to his plan that his new home be a city, not the woods, because he needs to be able to move around without a car, on his own two feet or on public transport. All of his transactions are cash. He rents a very shabby upstairs room with a separate entrance in a derelict neighborhood, on Sugar Street, but he won’t sign a lease. He pays his tough, tattooed landlady extra rent so she’ll supply the heat and electric: he wants no utility accounts in his name.

He provides lots of conflicting explanations for his hejira, some very high-minded, but he’s not a reliable narrator, and he’s clearly avoiding surveillance and the law. Needing a tool, he won’t shop in a Home Depot or a Lowes because of security cameras. He won’t eat in a McDonald’s or a Chik-fil-A, or go to a supermarket, because of security cameras. Of course he can’t get a job because he won’t give anyone his Social Security number. He spends time in the local library but won’t apply for borrowing privileges or even use its computerized card catalog. He avoids anything networked to anything. He’s full of diatribes against the dishonesty, the tawdriness, the surveillance, the manipulation, the violence, the injustice of contemporary white middle-class American life, and he wants to stop doing harm to the earth and to others:

To lighten my footprint, going forward. To leave as illegible a mark as possible on the earth, to minimize my use of its resources, not to drain those resources for my comfort. To become unobtrusive, and to live unobtruded upon. To insulate others from all the varieties of damage I can do. Have done. To resist the vanity of thinking that anything I have done can be put right or made better. To see without ruining. To make of my remaining days on earth a kind of spacewalk: to step outside the capsule, to cut the tether. To be blameless. To take no one down with me. To escape surveillance, both targeted and not. To avoid being identified. These, I remind myself, were the goals.

Perhaps.

He’s clearly well-educated, was middle-class in his former life—"privileged,” in current parlance—but in his own mind he’s becoming a kind of working-class hero:

It's a poor city, but of course there are rich people in it. Rich neighborhoods, rich enclaves. I walk through them as well—uneasily, because I don't look like I belong there, or maybe I only flatter myself that I no longer look like I belong there, maybe the part of me that looks like that is the part of me I can never take off. Anyway, there's a neighborhood called Stone Farms (I know this because it is carefully bordered by signs saying WELCOME TO HISTORIC STONE FARMS), which seems to have become a kind of privilege ghetto, if that makes any sense. People who have declined to join the exodus to the suburbs, those little white hamlets I will never see. People who "love old houses." They imagine they are doing something positive, something liberally noble, by not ceding the city's "historic" neighborhoods to the hordes who would not value architecture or preservation or landscaping. It's a class nostalgia that runs so deep they aren't even aware of it, or they mistake it for nostalgia for something else entirely, like Arts and Crafts. The streets are curved rather than straight.

His new home city has an immigrant detention center, or something like it—maybe it’s a sanctuary city—and his hideout neighborhood is traversed by dark-skinned immigrant kids going to and from school, refugees from Africa and the Middle East; he tries to identify with them, even to bond with some of them, but it’s not working.

We know one thing for certain about him: he has an envelope stuffed with $168,000 in cash, no bills larger than $100. Living, as he does, on canned soup, candy, and beer, he figures this will last him the rest of his life.

This is a short novel and I read it in one sitting. I can’t remember the last time I did that. Sugar Street is gripping and propulsively fast. In the narrator’s plan to disappear, to stay completely under the radar, the devil is very much in the details, and the reader’s curiosity remains piqued throughout. Why, really, has he run away, and does he get away with it? But most of the fascination of this story pertains to the narrator’s psyche. He is, we and he slowly realize, a very proud, and angry, and not very liberal guy.

[Richard · Rating 5 out of 5]

A gloriously insightful yet disturbing story of our protagonist (the man with no name) who is on the run with an envelope stuffed with cash and doing what he can to stay off the grid.

It's witty, and the observational humour is sardonic. Yet it's also filled with a sense of sad reality and foreboding.
This is a road trip with a dystopian feel that hints at ‘Into the Wild’ where the protagonist destroys all personal ID and possessions and anything connecting him to society. He eschews technology and hits back at politics, capitalism and the digitally intrusive big brother/big data society that has transformed the way we live.

“Then: I wandered lonely as a cloud. Now: iCloud”

It’s easy to feel sympathy and root for our hapless protagonist as he naively attempts various reboots of his life. The story is arguably a shot across the bows at society, asking us to re-examine how we live and who we are. It dissects the very essence of the meaning of the American Dream.

This is my first by author Jonathan Dee, and I’ll certainly check out his other work.

My thanks to NetGalley and Grove Atlantic for granting this e-ARC in exchange for an honest review.

[Joy D · Rating 3 out of 5]

Short novel about an unnamed man who is trying to escape his past. He is on the road and on the run from … something. He has a finite amount of cash that he plans to use over time to keep him going, as he lives with only the basic necessities. He avoids cameras and carries no identification. He eventually needs to stop running, meets a female landlord, and pays an annual rent with cash. The story is told entirely by the unreliable narrator. His backstory, at least part of it, is revealed in small increments. He is remorseful but also angry. He wants to escape from himself but finds out how difficult that can be. It is engaging in a cynical way. I found the ending strange and vaguely unsatisfying (perhaps that was the point).

[Mike Hartnett · Rating 2 out of 5]

The only saving grace was that it moved quickly enough to get it over with. Half-baked in the extreme. Writing was totally unremarkable. Plot was uninteresting. Kept reading because several reviews said the book addressed white privilege. Sort of? He did a bunch of stupid stuff that the author kind of loosely tied to being a white, privileged male I guess. But there was zero analysis—no “why did this happen” at all. And the end - no spoiler, but it felt like it had no relationship to the rest of the book at all. Instead of opening up questions about the character’s behavior, it made me wonder if the author simply never came up with any reason this might have happened.

As an additional fyi, the audiobook narrator is terrible. I didn’t care for the book aside from that, but he did not do the book any favors.

[Tom Mooney · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Nobody except you cares what you have to say."

Even writing a review of Sugar Street is a disservice to its energy.

But fuck, it was good.

A bitter, unreliable narrator who has shunned his life and attempted to disappear. To clock out. We don't know much of his backstory (and never really find out), only that he comes from some comfort and is sick of it. He arrives in a working class city where he hopes to simply vanish. But how can you vanish in a world where everything is seen? Where everyone craves to be seen?

Sugar Street is a great novel for our times, a savage dissection of white privilege, male privilege, human privilege. It's a sneering, nihilistic takedown of contemporary culture. Loved it.

[Bruce Katz · Rating 3 out of 5]

A quick, fun read. A nameless man is on the run from… someone. Because he did… something. He stays as inconspicuous as possible, avoiding unnecessary encounters with people, going nowhere that might have surveillance cameras. The story is told through his eyes so our opinions about him are continually changing. Is he a good guy? A hero? A murderer? We do find out before the book is done what he did and who he’s running from but the answers, while good to know, are less fun than trying to sort out what kind of guy he is and whether the book is intended to be read as metaphor, social commentary, or a chronicle of a troubled mind. There’s evidence for all of these in the book. It’d make for an interesting discussion, I think.

[Jarrett Neal · Rating 4 out of 5]

Just stop talking, stop posting, stop tweeting.

I know I'm not alone in my conviction that social media is one of the worst things to ever happen to the human race. A tool that could have been harnessed to expand the breadth of humanity's goodness has, in a brief period of time, accelerated its demise. Yes, that's a fatalist, even myopic point of view, but I challenge anyone to prove me wrong, especially after they read Sugar Street, a novel that is really a polemic wrapped in a mystery.

The unnamed narrator of Jonathan Dee's novel is on the run, and stories about people on the run always spark interest. From the outset, the narrator is determined to separate himself from the modern world. Just about everyone at one time or another has been overcome with the urge to leave the world behind, live off-grid, escape the modern world and live in total solitude. Stranger in the Woods, a nonfiction book that came out a few years ago, reports the life of a man who did just that, and lived for twenty-seven years in the wilds of Maine with severely limited contact with the outside world. Dee's antihero, impelled by paranoia, wants to do just that, but with each shrewd decision he makes another one that undermines him.

This guy is on the run but we never know what from until the end of the book. Is he insane or have the myraid incursions on otherwise peaceable life in twenty-first century America driven him out of society? He's got over one hundred and sixty thousand dollars in cash and no plan other than to live in solitude, away from computers, cameras, and any technology that would leave a trace of his identity. Yet he chooses to do so in a big city, which sabotages his aims from the start. And stranger things are yet to come.

The primary antagonist of Sugar Street is modern technology and its ability to surveil our every move. We live in a society that is constantly monitoring us; nothing we do, especially online, is totally private anymore. Have an innoucous converstation during which you offhandedly mention that you need to stop by the store to pick up orange juice, and within seconds your cellphone will ping with a slew of articles about orange juice, YouTube videos about orange juice, push notifications about cocktails featuring orange juice, and advertisements for orange juice. This Orwellian surveillance is precisely what the narrator is trying to escape. His plan to live a monastic life in an unnamed city isn't well thought out. It appears all he wants to do is keep himself alive until his money runs out. This is one of the things that hurts the novel. Dee doesn't give his narrator much of a goal; however, his thoughts and actions are so intriguing one can't help but keep reading to get at the source of it all.

In truth, the narrator is the personification of white liberal guilt. From his comments on the ways white culture has and continues to damage the lives of immigrants and people of color to the phoniness of politics and the brutailty of law enforcement, Dee wants to depict the ways race, money, and class create a "good" citizen and simultaneously strips others of both their citizenship and humanity. The narrator, at his core, wants to do good. His observations and interactions with a group of neighborhood youths proves that. But to do so requires his participation in society. The condundrum of those who seek to completely sever themselves from society is that in the twenty-first century this is an impossiblity. Even those who commit to living completely off-grid will have to interact with society at some point if they are to stay alive.

For its first 150 pages, Sugar Street is a propsulive read. I could hardly put it down. Yet once the real reasons the narrator went on the run are revealed, like Autumn, the narrator's blowsy landlady (and more), I was let down. The resolution of the plot didn't work for me, even though I understand the point Dee is trying to make. I think, like his anithero, Dee could have made better choices. Yet the novel's meditations on identity, free will, the gradual destruction of our humanity and society's march toward totalitarianism will keep readers turning pages. Sugar Street is a haunting novel, even if it does fumble to resolve itself.

[Carmel Hanes · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a quick and intriguing listen on audio. 3.5 rounded down.

In this day of surveillance cameras, club cards, internet tracking, social media footprints, GPS location finders, have you ever wondered what it would be like to unplug from it all? What might propel each of us to do so? Is all that tracking comforting or disturbing?

Our unnamed protagonist does just that, choosing to live anonymously with a large stash of cash to get him by; working hard to stay invisible in a world that sees through the invisibility cloak in unexpected ways. His motivations trickle out at a snail's pace as he notices other "invisibles" within the small circle of his life. While it seems he's left something troubling behind, his current behavior suggests a new direction, a different motivation, an unmet need he's desperate to fulfill.

Part mystery, part social commentary, the novel stabs at white privilege and cultural divisions in a new way. It presents imperfect people in an imperfect world through one man's eyes as he rejects the "norm" on his one-man mission. Although not all bows were tied up at the end, it kept my interest throughout.

[Andy Weston · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a fierce character study of a man in crisis, a bleak story of a man fleeing his troubled past to swap it only for a more perilous future.

A picture of the unnamed protagonist gradually builds up over the course of the novel; he was from a piviliged background, highly educated, was lawyer, and yet he is guilty of unspecified wrongdoing, but as his mood changes he fluctuates between assertions of remorse and of vindication.

Without any form of indentification, at the beginning of the book he is on the road heading east. Pretty much all his has with him is an envelope with exactly $168,548 in cash.

Having arrived in a nameless city he finds a basic first floor room, with the owner, a tough and no-nonsense woman living downstairs.

Effectively in hiding, though from what we left only to guess, the narrator conducts his life off-grid.
The tension barely lets up for its 200 pages, though its apparent brevity is deceiving, its complexities are strewn with unease.

[Carey Calvert · Rating 5 out of 5]

There’s an old Chris Rock joke (Bring the Pain, 1996) about Martin Luther King. “You know what is sad, man? Martin Luther King stood for non-violence. Now what’s Martin Luther King? A street! And Idgaf where you are in America, if you’re on a Martin Luther King Boulevard, there is some violence going down!

It ain’t the safest place to be.”

There’s little sugar in or on Sugar Street, Jonathan Dee’s eight novel, a frantic and myopic countdown; one beset with the most mundane of perils that, in our unnamed narrator’s mind and the reader’s, reach such a calamitous level, it becomes more frightening in its simplicity.

Dee’s fifth novel, The Privileges, was a finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize.

We already know we’re in capable and defining hands that can make the mendacity palatable.

… and thrilling.

Sugar Street opens with a screed of the American Interstate highway system, that “wonder of the twentieth-century world.”

Not only is it smooth, wide and fast, it’s also “inexhaustible, blank, amnesiac.”

Our narrator is on the run; from what, we don’t know. “I’m old enough to remember when the paper maps were the only maps.”

We also know he has $168,548.00 in cash. “I went outside the law.” Nevertheless, how he obtained it, we can only surmise, perhaps it’s stolen.

“I have chosen to make myself go away.”

For now.

The money itself serves as a countdown as we’re always aware it’s a finite amount. The narrator can make no more and we’re led to believe when it’s gone, so is he.

But Dee draws upon the opportunity to create chaos in this seemingly one-man play to discuss politics, race, privilege, humanity, isolation, police brutality, and most importantly, consequences.

“The problem with shrinking your life down to a handful of pieces is that when one of those pieces is taken away, the effect is disproportionate. Knowing that one’s thoughts or perceptions are irrational does not make one safe from them."

Because all those things you hate.

They’re in you.

It ain’t the safest place to be.

[Kimball · Rating 2 out of 5]

Reading this was like being inside the head of one of my old DCPL library patrons. It’s definitely not a place you would want to spend too much time. It was an adventure in which the narrator gets more and more sporadic, derailed, and furious at the world around him.
•
In SUGAR STREET, the unnamed male narrator has taken as much money as he could and started driving on back roads. He is obsessed with facial recognition and makes sure that he will not be caught on camera—this means no hotels, no high ways, no commercial gas stations or stores. At some point, he decides it’s time to trade in his car, the last thing connecting him to his old life. With a new to him car, he finishes his drive to where he decided would be the perfect place to hide—a city. He eventually finds a room to rent and starts to settle in. He then shares his account of the next year, which involves shrinking his world and leaving no footprint. He spends a lot of time watching immigrant students travel to and from school from his window as well as at the library, where he comments about the authoritarian librarians. He doesn’t really do much during this time and every action he makes towards kindness is completely naïve and not thought out. To be honest, I’m surprised he lasted as long as he did. The manifesto at the end really makes you question his sanity.

[Holly · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well written, compelling and yet I'm left scratching my head as to whether I would recommend this book. Yes, it's well written and engaging and while there's not much "action" there's an awful lot to chew on. The entire book is a character study and, in my opinion, the decomposition of this character. At the start of the book the unnamed male narrator hits the road, has a cache of money stored under his car seat and is off to ensure he gets far enough away without detection so that he can find a new life. In this new place his life grows smaller and smaller and he seemingly turns more and more inward such that the reader doesn't know if he's slowly losing his mind or coming to grips with it. I couldn't put it down as I wanted to know what happened in the end, but I found it less than satisfying. Very interesting themes of racial injustice, white entitlement, societal surveillance, etc. I'm giving it 3 stars because some parts were brilliant and others disappointing.

[AndiReads · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jonathan Dee is the Pulitzer Prize finalist for The Privileges and he has written a fantastic, fast moving story about a man who is fleeing his former life.

An unnamed narrator answers an ad to rent a room on Sugar Street. He has destroyed all of his personal possessions and identification. He seems ultra paranoid and resolves to live off a sum of cash that he carries with him. As he begins making a life on Sugar Street we follow him as he tries to right his ship and live a better life. Unfortunately, as well know, it is impossible to run away from yourself.

Quick moving, and suspenseful, this unnamed man will live in your mind for a long, long time. If you love great literature, commentary on contemporary life, or just dream of throwing it all away, Sugar Street is for you! #GroveAtlantic #GrovePress #SugarStreet #JonathanDee

[Phyllis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Here is the story of one anonymous white man's path. His path from affluent entitled business-owner, to off-the-grid rejection of technology and responsibility and connection, to angry man with a gun.

We don't have to like him, but we should know that he exists. And it is his own personal struggles with his own conscience that give rise to this story.

This novel is thought-provoking. It would be easy to think "boo hoo for the poor little rich white man" about the character depicted here, but he is no less a struggling human being than any other on the planet. I'm gonna have to sit with this one for a while.

[Kamakana · Rating 5 out of 5]

if you like this review i now have website: www.michaelkamakana.com

240414: read in one sitting. fast, fluid, fascinating. what it is to go 'off-grid', in contemporary usa. this made me think of existentialism and camus, more importantly, influential, is that it is sort of a novel-length treatment of the significant digression in Dashiell hammet's The Maltese Falcon, http://fallingbeam.org/beam.htm...

[Neil · Rating 5 out of 5]

SUGAR STREET follows an anonymous White man on the run from his own identity. Delivered in the form of a condensed, breathless countdown to the inevitability of consequence, the story embodies an electrifying subversion of the very rationale behind society.

Apart from his race, the protagonist is left intentionally nondescript. Both his interior and his newfound exterior lives begin on the first page, allowing us to witness a unique sort of baptism. And yet, the humor with which he responds to his surroundings marks him with a distinctive voice.

His sprint from the hyper-surveillance of the world is revved up by brisk critiques of its condition. Despite this, every craggy edge settles into a whole, preserving the story’s heady momentum. Dee takes a rather maddening concept, one lying dormant in our subconscious, and molds it into an oppressive desire. Consequently, to demand consent is to declare yourself condemnable. And that’s exactly how the protagonist lives.

In an attempt to smother his own identity, he suffocates the present. Everything is stripped back and rudimentary, from his living space to his manner. The observational writing style feeds both the story’s continued glide forward, and its simultaneous unraveling. That’s because an acute sense of hysteria accompanies the feeling of being wedged inside a mind on high alert.

Propelled by the steady trickling down of the protagonist’s budget, it recasts itself as dread. And, much like the white noise of the internet from which the man flees, this tension creates a piercing high that runs like a vein through SUGAR STREET.

The more time we spend with the protagonist, the more elaborate the coating of his thoughts appears. From conversational to confessional, his words carry an undertone of mystery — suspicion, even. And yet, there’s a lyricism to them that both beguiles and fascinates.

In the spirit of switching from the internet of things to the internet of senses, as the protagonist puts it, his existence is whittled down to comments and frenzied reactions. And so, passivity takes on the function of an auxiliary fuel system. The path it directs him onto is riddled with humanity’s unspoken destitutions. We could even say that it covers the broad spectrum of its irreparability.

Surprisingly, though, his observations about racial injustice, poverty, data-driven invigilation, narcissism, and more don’t seem unduly pessimistic. Daring and sardonic, yes, but also emboldening. In fact, SUGAR STREET’s mad brilliance lies in the way it strips us of our delusions.

The pointlessness of many of our behaviors is whetted, from appealing to governments for equality and compassion — the very mindsets that threaten them — to spending our lives toiling away for the sake of a system keeping us enslaved. The world we inhabit in SUGAR STREET is, therefore, in the end stages of democracy, capitalism, and liberalism.

The fact that it mirrors reality is obvious, but edges are still purposefully blurred. And since the story occupies both a fictional and a factual plane, the author lets us hold onto the illusion of its inauthenticity. In this way, we’re offered a taste of the protagonist’s freedom. Our actions will either mimic the closing of a news tab — a snappy disconnection from somebody else’s pain — or it will set SUGAR STREET’s message bouncing around the mind.

As we trudge on, the agony of being a piece of data with a traceable, unshakeable mark on history gives way to exhilarating reclusiveness. Inaction turns into the purest form of rebellion. And yet, despite his strive toward anonymity, the protagonist is ravenous for connection; one of his own choosing.

His emotional engagement with the fates of the schoolchildren that pass by his window introduces an element of bleak, unrequited tenderness. Here, too, we see how appearances affect both the world’s view of us, and our own self-worth. Privilege, a recurring theme in Dee’s work, is scrutinized with impeccable self-awareness; especially its subliminal mechanisms.

We may be aware of our thought processes, but this understanding doesn’t alter the way they affect how we function. Similarly, the protagonist is shocked by people’s inability to recall meeting him. This idea, which achieves its climax during a savage interaction with a law officer, is crippling. What’s more, Dee’s ability to convey the sound of a spirit splintering inside the body is uncanny.

This is where society undergoes a particularly merciless dissection. The fact that we’re animals, merely another detail of Nature’s evolving form, exposes the instincts that drive us. And which, coincidentally, ensure that society will never function as it should.

Fear leads to humiliation, which in turn fosters anger. Power betrays no tendency toward self-sabotage, making all forms of inequality its footing. Human nature, with its self-preoccupation, proves impossible to peel, doomed to rot from the inside out.

As a result, SUGAR STREET reads a lot like a diary written mid-apocalypse. The cataclysm we’re witnessing may concern identity, but the impression it leaves is one of society devouring itself. And, in a tantalizing twist, the protagonist becomes the Petri dish, in which humankind is examined.

At one point, he states that he’s moving in the direction of the unknown within himself; a somewhat foreboding thought, one reminiscent of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Stories. After that, his life, as stifled and warped as it seems, just sort of happens. His things wander around, changing their place of belonging much like him. It’s not until his collision with his past self that his passivity is challenged one last time.

We’re left with a curious impasse. The man, whose headspace we’ve made our own, customized obscenely with both judgment and sentiment, is suddenly — violently — revealed to us as a stranger, as physical to others as he’s intangible to us.

This turn of events is partly expected from the beginning, of course, but still manages to feel like a betrayal of discernment. In this way, Dee brilliantly reinforces the idea of the fallacy of our prepossessions.

[Scott Cumming · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dee returns with a book that has to be described as literary crime even though we are very much unaware of the crime committed for much of the book. We meet our unnamed protagonist on the run with a envelope filled with money. He is looking to remain out of sight from society, avoiding anywhere with surveillance or means of identification as a requirement.

He alights upon a small city and moves into a room on Sugar Street. His landlady is suspicious and foul mouthed with him at every turn and he creates a routine made up of watching children walk to and from school. Most of the children are immigrants of some ilk and raise the ire of his landlady after breaking her cherry tree. There is a theme regarding the treatment of new immigrants to the US in a land that is built upon the blood and sweat of immigrants from its very discovery.

The other theme running through is how it is futile to just stand back and do nothing. Participation is required if you ever want anything to change. It is not enough to run and hide from what life is even as we feel things degrading around us.

This is a short sharp shock of a novel from Dee and is quite the leap from his previous work.

[Jay Woods · Rating 5 out of 5]

Finished Sugar Street by Jonathan Dee this afternoon. It’s an excellent, if a bit depressing, book. The first person narrator, a middle-aged white man on the run from something, reveals in vignettes and brief aphorisms the plight of a person who fits that demographic bill. Our society seems optimized for a middle-aged white man, but in trying to “make himself smaller” and less noticeable, which includes getting rid of his ID, car, avoiding all forms of electronic surveillance and not using the internet, the man gains access to some realities which may have previously gone unnoticed. As soon as his clothes are thrift shop purchased, he has no car, no name, no ID, and apparently no money, he trades in his privilege and becomes more suspect. In fact he becomes different only in his racial appearance from other individuals in the community where he drops down to hide. Surprise: it sucks.

It occurred to me that the nameless main character is more or less like Boo Radley in To Kill A Mockingbird. He is hiding from being observed in the world due to fear or shame for something he did coming back to haunt him. The character in Sugar Street is more modern in the sense he tries to avoid places with surveillance tech (which are many, more than people know), but it is still more or less a similar move. Maybe his sense of trying to start over is also like Gatsby to a certain extent. Gatsby had firm reasons (Daisy) to remake himself. Early on, the main character has not revealed a specific motivation, but hinted that he took something that people will eventually miss and want back.

It was chilling to read how quick Autumn (the person who lets him rent a room in her house) is to assume that there is something wrong with him. She asks, “What’s your deal?” She assumes because he is using a fake name, paying in advance, not asking questions, and avoiding public contact that there must be something wrong, a la he’s an ex con, a perv, on the run from the law, or criminals, etc. The moment she sees him do something to potentially contact a kid who lost notebook while walking by their house, Autumn realizes she has a kind of currency, a card to play in a game that hasn’t yet begun. The scene also depicts how much the tenant in Autumn’s house wants contact with people, something that he has denied himself due to the fact he is trying to disappear.

The female character Autumn elevates the plot in some interesting ways. She is clearly not the type of person the narrator has had much experience with in the past. When she behaves in unpredictable ways, all he can do is mull it over and strategize for their next encounter. She holds much capital in their relationship; he needs shelter and anonymity, and safety from those who might be seeking him. She provides that, but can also change her mind about helping him disappear. Autumn does not trust the narrator on any level, despite the fact she seems to have some power in their relationship, and she has a firearm. It seems as though she has been burned up in the past by men, and has a lot of defenses up to ward off any more trouble with them.

The narrator’s key mistake is acting as if he can still use some of his former privilege on occasion. It’s reflexive; he isn’t even aware that when he asks a police officer to explain why he can’t just stand on a street wherever he wants, that is a privilege not allowed to an apparently down on his luck, low-social class drifter. So he gets what might happen in this instance to someone who presses for rights they don’t really have: a beating. He is using instinct from a lifetime of moving freely in society. The cop is also acting without much thought. He has merit badges already for dealing with people just like this guy. It is truly a painful lesson that the reader can see coming in an uncomfortable way.

Toward the end of the story, there is a section that begins, My manifesto:

By making that move, it has the reader reframe his or her thinking about the book altogether. He is anticipating using Autumn’s gun, which he has stolen, to kill a judge whose militaristic election sign sat across the street facing their house for months. The judge “looks a little like me,” which sort of levels up what would seem to be more or less an assassination attempt. Is he trying to kill himself without actually carrying out the suicide part? The “my manifesto” part is unfortunately familiar as a pattern seen in dozens of shootings and other horrific crimes in the US now. We find out later via a written document that the person has traveled a horrible path to bring HIM (almost always) to the point at which he will take others’ lives. It explains the tragedy as an act of someone who is mentally ill, radicalized, tormented, driven apart from the human connection we all need to feel well.

So it sort of makes me think again about the purpose of the book. Is it to explain how white middle-aged men can feel unfairly targeted by a society that has tired of everything being set up to their advantage? Is it to allow people to understand how a person descends into a state that would allow him to take another person’s life even though they may not even be acquainted? Is it to demonstrate how it feels when circumstances are such that a person of privilege relinquishes that privilege and finds out the hard way how working class, less financially stable, non-white people experience the world?

Maybe it’s all of those things, and maybe that’s what makes it outstanding. It’s a book that engenders a careful self-examination for some. But for others, it’s a chance to see the kind person who always seems to skate away just out of reach of any real harm, actually feel some pain.

[Stephanie Sharp · Rating 5 out of 5]

Imagine if Henry David Thoreau had written American Psycho.

[Deborah · Rating 4 out of 5]

The unnamed white protagonist is fleeing from his past, from what exactly we don’t know, having shed his identity and staying entirely off the grid, with only a manila envelope stuffed with $168,548, at first hidden under his car seat, then under the mattress in the crappy room he rents from a hostile tattooed landlady. This bleak character study skilfully maintains the tension between the man’s past and what seems surely to lie in store for him. Dee, with sly dark humour, has his narrator gradually reveal and eschew his former life of white privilege as he assumes a new, virtuous life, mouthing bland and shallow liberal sentiments—until his new persona collides with his neighbours in his working-class ’hood.

[Richard Thompson · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don't know. In some ways it was really good, but it was also imperfect. All we know for sure even at the end is that the narrator has run away from his former life with a modest but still significant pile of cash. He spins a lot of stories for himself about what his former life might have been, but they are all works of his imagination. He tries to connect with people around him, but not really because he views everyone with fear and suspicion and is unwilling to do anything that might reveal his identity. Surely, if he had really wanted to escape, he would have been better served in finding a remote cabin or moving to another country. Instead he opts for the familiar, renting a cheap room for cash in a sleazy part of town in a nearby city. He has brief encounters with neighborhood kids and a guy from the library, but it is all shallow and unsatisfying, as is his relationship with his alcoholic landlady. He wants to be a good person, to be helpful, to leave a small footprint on the world so as not to damage it, but all of his efforts are lame. Without any real connections to other people, his life is pathetic and small. Maybe its a metaphor for how we all live in the modern world, but I hope not. I'd rather be in prison than live this guy's life.

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

“What a cesspool this world is. Democracy, capitalism, liberalism: all in the lurid end-stages of their own failure, yet we won’t even try to imagine anything different, any other principle around which life might be organized: we would sooner choke each other to death, which is basically what we are doing.”

“What are books anyway, though, in this world? Little antiquities. A library is a sort of roadside museum.”

Our unnamed male narrator has decided to fall completely off the grid, the only thing in his possession is $168,000. He diligently avoids any security cameras, (very difficult to do) or leave any type of footprint- cash only, no ID. He decides to live in a poor section of a distant town and rents an apartment from and an oddball landlady. How the world finally tracks him down, despite all this, is the point of the story. I did enjoy most of this slim novel, in a strangely hypnotic way but was not satisfied by its conclusion, along with some unnecessary pontification. If the premise is intriguing enough to you, give it a try.

[Cherise Wolas · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read Dinosaurs by Lydia Millet - about a white wealthy man imbued with goodness, leaving his old life for a new one in Arizona, and followed that with this one, Sugar Street, about a white man, once wealthier than he is now, who disappears himself in America, Dinosaurs far less political than this one, but a similarity of premise. One wanting to do good, the other wanting to do no more harm, but he can't help himself. Where Sugar Street is most enthralling is the unpacking of how a person could disappear, cease to exist while continuing to exist, in an America where there is CCTV everywhere, where every person is followed every day in myriad ways. A protagonist whose background is slowly revealed, though not all of it, not all of the reasons for why he has taken himself away, but a man who has not done good, and finds himself, despite his best efforts, on a precipice.