Dee is a risk taker...and his restless, adventurous, at times reckless approach is nowhere more evident than in his latest roll of the dice: the taut, bare-bones, not entirely user-friendly Sugar Street ... Bleak as all this may sound, it’s in the methodical unpacking of how a human being might effectively cease to exist without actually committing suicide that Sugar Street is at its most enthralling ... The tension of Dee’s novel, especially in the closing pages, arises less from concern for X’s fate (we’ve been fairly confident, pretty much from the jump, that things won’t turn out well) than the narrative’s increasingly divided loyalties between down-and-dirty realism and the stylized, moody, hard-boiled punch of noir. Naturalism triumphs in the end — appropriately so, I’d say — but at a price. Clothing a story in the elegant trappings of crime fiction, a genre as dogmatic as it is beloved, only to dispense with the expected genre payoff is risky, to put it mildly.
Dee takes...dull, repetitive actions and fills them with suspense; this narrator, to an ultimately devastating degree, is unpredictable ... 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.
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 ... Ultimately, the novel functions as a bravura exercise in generating suspense with relatively limited means ... 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.
The book has a hot concept ... Sugar Street is expertly done, with a good balance of provocative thinking and surprising developments, remaining satisfying even when we can see that the seeds of the ominous ending were planted early on, right in the structure of the man’s life and maybe even in society itself. At times I wanted it to work out its themes more explicitly, but then again, no. Leave space for the reader to think — after all, too much extraneous babble, especially online, is one of the things the narrator stands against.
A peculiar little book that’s fascinating in its atypical way and maybe even unusual enough to fit in with our conspicuously peculiar sociopolitical climate ... A peculiar, allegorical book written by a talented, wary penman who’s warming up for another chart topper.
An intense character study of a man in crisis. It's a bleak tale of someone running from a troubled past into an equally perilous future, and Dee succeeds in maintaining the tension about his character's fate throughout ... A precisely drawn portrait of the near futility of attempting to lead a life totally off the grid ... With the skill of a virtuoso, Dee plays his character's shifting voice over its full emotional range--cunning, desperate, cynical, resigned and more ... At barely more than 200 pages, Sugar Street is a novel that easily can be consumed in a single sitting. But that brevity is deceptive, because it's far from a simple book, and the feeling of unease it induces makes it an unsettling reading experience.
A story of the desperation and ultimate impossibility of isolation, Dee’s narrative is a spider web of questions that won’t let readers go, questions like where does insanity begin and end? Readers of Dee’s earlier novels will not want to miss this page-turner.
An energetic character study ... Though a bit slim, Dee’s work grapples intriguingly with the narrator’s liberal myopia. It stands as a showcase of Dee’s masterly prose.
