Review: 'Sugar Street,' by Jonathan Dee

In "Sugar Street," Jonathan Dee's latest novel, his unnamed narrator complains, "You can't travel ten miles in any direction without your movements being logged, your license plate photographed, your face."

Several pages later, the tone has shifted: "It's hard to draw breath in this world — to feed yourself, to work, to move from place to place — without doing damage of some kind," he claims. He tries to erase all traces of his former, apparently conventional life, and to live in solitude, though his reluctant landlord, Autumn, is suspicious. The narrator silently drafts identities for himself. He looks out his window. He visits the library. He spends frugally from his envelope full of cash — enough cash to sustain him, at his pace, indefinitely.

Dee takes these dull, repetitive actions and fills them with suspense; this narrator, to an ultimately devastating degree, is unpredictable. On a walk, he leaves his impoverished section of town (on the titular Sugar Street) for the "rich enclaves," suspecting that he looks like he doesn't belong; immediately thereafter, he challenges his own thought. "Maybe I only flatter myself that I no longer look like I belong there," Dee writes.

The narrator distrusts and dislikes the way technology can preserve his actions and behaviors; yet when he cannot find Autumn in December, as it snows, "the ground records and freezes every footstep." Recording and freezing, it would seem, are the very things the narrator hopes to avoid; thus, the success of his project seems to dwindle.

A loquacious man, at least in terms of interior monologue, he also insists that "Words are vain." Autumn antagonizes him, but keeps him safe by legitimizing his presence in her house. "The very idea of flight from myself, from my identity, is laughable," he laments.

A broken cherry tree has a kind of fracturing effect on the work overall; in an effort to keep Autumn, who owns the tree, from seeking violent retribution, the narrator finds himself developing stronger connections to the people around him. He also becomes increasingly violent. "It's an act, but it's also not," he thinks, in the wake of threatening an acquaintance.

Dee is skilled at creating and examining multifaceted tension on the page, sustaining it as his narrator, who hurls contempt at most of the things around him, takes on the very qualities he deems contemptible.

Jackie Thomas-Kennedy's writing has appeared in American Short Fiction, One Story, Electric Literature, Lenny Letter, Narrative, Harvard Review, and elsewhere. She held a 2014-2016 Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University.

Sugar Street

By: Jonathan Dee

Publisher: Grove Atlantic, 206 pages, $26.