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?
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.
