American writer Jonathan Dee is best known here for The Privileges (2010), which showed us a New York banking family rendered dysfunctional by the ill-gotten gains of money-market skulduggery. Money, to say nothing of privilege, also lies at the heart of his new book, which takes the starker form of a claustrophobic monologue from an unnamed middle-aged male fugitive going off-grid for reasons he won’t divulge. Avoiding CCTV, he’s destroyed his devices and, after pitching up in search of a bed in a poor district in an unspecified city, he’s about to ditch his scrap-salvaged car, too; all he’s keeping is a cryptically procured envelope containing $168,000. “The money is mine now, though that won’t stop other people from maintaining that at least some of it is theirs,” he says early on, coyly alluding to his “crimes”.
The stage is set for a propulsive post-heist thriller, with inbuilt tension, in the sense that the narrator will be rumbled before long – but for what? While key disclosures are expertly postponed, we soon sense that Sugar Street hunts bigger game in any case, with the getaway premise only a pretext for exploring nothing less than the politics of 21st-century selfhood. When the narrator finds a room to rent cash in hand on a don’t-ask-don’t-tell basis, he ponders the cover story he might give his landlady, privately mulling explanations from being in witness protection to simply being unable to “stand being seen as data... I couldn’t stand the idea that every little choice I’d made, however thoughtless or dumb, was now part of my history”.
Added to his dread of internet surveillance is gratitude that he’s no longer in thrall to “celebrities, politics, culture”; there’s a touch of smugness, too, in his sense that his newly modest lifestyle benefits the environment, not to mention anyone sick of middle-aged straight white men taking up space (“What is my role in this world? What is my place? What a white question, to assume or even to imagine that I must have one,” he thinks). Part of Dee’s subtle skill lies in how seductive he makes all this strenuous rationalising on the narrator’s part, even as it’s also clearly a puffed-up display of self-exculpating sophistry, not to mention a potential symptom of spiralling madness.
Ultimately, the novel functions as a bravura exercise in generating suspense with relatively limited means. Increasingly uneasy interactions between the narrator and various locals, not least a group of schoolchildren who seem to fuel deep-lying fantasies of atonement, begin to have an edge of violence that always feels ready to bare its teeth – and all that cash tucked under his mattress, to say nothing of the loaded gun in his landlady’s drawer, represent a dangled narrative fuse duly lit amid a last-gasp gear shift into bloodshed. But ultimately Sugar Street’s symbolism does just as much to keep you on edge, bringing us queasily close to a self-cancelling antihero who is simultaneously sent up and – you suspect – just a little bit admired.
Sugar Street by Jonathan Dee is published by Corsair (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
