Sugar Street

A Novel

By: Jonathan Dee

Narrated by: Chris Andrew Ciulla

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.

©2022 Jonathan Dee (P)2022 Blackstone Publishing

Masterful

I finished listening to this book on Audible within 24 hours. It was engaging and begged one’s attention to what was coming up next. Throughout the entire book, this reader/listener had a sense that something bad was going to happen, but it was not clear what that might be, and bad to whom.

Jonathan Dee is extremely masterful to depict the rich inner world of a man who lived in this one particular year full of nothingness, yet also everything. It is such a pleasant experience to listen to the book.

Disappointing end

A simple story with some mystery to it but eventually ends in a scree.
His point is lost on me. Perhaps good for a book club discussion to figure out what the point was.

Intriguing and Unique

I forced myself to stick with this after struggling through it for the first third of the book, and, having finished it, I’m glad I did. The narrator (of the book, not the performer) is unreliable, but we want to believe him. That turns out to be a bad idea. A noir that’s an anti-noir at the same time, combined with insights into privilege, wokeness, racism, sexism, poverty, class, immigration, resentment, anger, hostility, denial, self-deception.

No point

What’s the point? There is no point. Intriguing concept but it doesn’t go anywhere. Narration/Audio performance is good.

A screed is a screed by any other name

This tale starts with promise and has potential to pack a punch but it settles for diatribes against all of human effort , all of governance , all of relationships. Nihilism writ small

Meh

Meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh. It was just meh. Nothing more or less.

Waste of time

Turn out to be just a boring white guy story. I’m stayed till the end. The narrator was good though.