A fugitive is driving on an American interstate highway, $168,000 in small-denomination notes in a brown envelope under the passenger seat. Nameless and largely shorn of his past, he seems at first an archetype, an actor in a road movie, a metaphor: “the nuclear shadow of the frontier spirit, even if you happen to be travelling east instead of west”. He is heading to a city he has no ties with, where he hopes to disappear – for good.
Sugar Street is Jonathan Dee’s eighth novel; his fifth, The Privileges, was a finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer prize for fiction. A sprawling, epic story of great wealth, it stands in seeming contrast to Sugar Street, a brief account of living on society’s margins that can be read in a day; nonetheless they are a pair, both grappling with the same question in different ways: how to process the guilt that these days attends being a well-educated white man in America.
