07/04/2022

Dee returns 11 years after his Pulitzer finalist The Privileges with an energetic character study of a white man determined to escape from his life. It starts with a burst of electric first-person action, as the unnamed narrator drives on back roads across the country, keeping off the interstate to avoid cameras, with $168,048 in cash. The narrator dishes an acerbic perspective on the passing roadside (“unzoned hellscapes in which every fast-food restaurant on earth operates a franchise side by side”) and his aversion to surveillance belies a vague paranoia. He rents an unlisted room in a small unspecified city from Autumn, a healthcare worker and heavy drinker. There, his self-imposed isolation proves easier in theory than practice. After a child named Abiha accidentally drops her notebook outside Autumn’s house on her way to school, the narrator returns it. The satisfaction of helping Abiha, whom he describes as a “person of color,” whets his appetite for more acts of anonymous charity with his surplus of cash. Before long, he arouses suspicions from Autumn, the neighborhood children, and the police, setting him on a collision course with the life he left behind. 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. (Sept.)

Praise for Sugar Street

"An energetic character study of a white man determined to escape from his life...Dee’s work grapples intriguingly with the narrator’s liberal myopia. It stands as a showcase of Dee’s masterly prose." — Publishers Weekly

“An unsettling, propulsive, sometimes acidly funny book.” — Kirkus Reviews

Praise for The Locals

“A bold, vital, and view-expanding novel.”—George Saunders

“Amid the heat of today’s vicious political climate, The Locals is a smoke alarm. Listen up.”—Ron Charles, The Washington Post

“Captivating.”—USA Today

“Addictive reading.”—The Wall Street Journal

“No one gets off the moral hook in this propulsive, brilliantly observed study.”—People (Book of the Week)

“A steady, intelligent probing of family ties and sibling rivalry and themes that illuminate how we live now.”—Newsday

“In this moving study of how the housing bubble’s burst sets a small town’s citizens against each other, Jonathan Dee tells a must-read story for our age. Class struggle, tyranny, America’s disillusionment after 9/11—The Locals creates a delicately drawn world impossible to forget.”—Mary Karr, New York Times bestselling author of The Liar’s Club

“There could not be a more timely novel than The Locals. It examines the American self and American selfishness from 9/11 until today. Jonathan Dee has given us a master class in empathy and compassion, a vital book.”—Nathan Hill, author of The Nix

“Blackly comic, effortlessly authoritative, The Locals is almost criminal in its perceptiveness about the screwed state of the American union. Jonathan Dee is a modern American master.”—Joseph O’Neill, author of Netherland and The Dog

Praise for The Privileges

“Jonathan Dee is a modern American Master.” — Joseph O’Neill

“Transfixing…composed in Dee’s typically elegant style—gorgeous winding sentences.” — Los Angeles Times

“Full of elegance, vitality and complexity.” — The New York Times Book Review

“Scintillating.” — The Washington Post

“Admirably relentless.” — The New Yorker

“A deliciously sophisticated engine of literary darkness.” — Jonathan Franzen

“Pitch perfect prose.” — Chicago Tribune

"Dee moves from scene to scene like a cinematographer, capturing the essence of a character in a telling glimpse."—Financial Times

"Dee’s luminous prose never falters; he’s a master."—Entertainment Weekly

"A deliciously sophisticated engine of literary darkness."—The Guardian

"The novel goes down like a perfectly chilled glass of champagne—crisp, sparkling and delicious."—Bookforum

"The Privileges is verbally brilliant, intellectually astute, and intricately knowing. It is also very funny and a great, great pleasure to read. Jonathan Dee is a wonderful writer."—Richard Ford

"Here is an incredibly readable, intelligent, incisive portrait of a particular kind of American family. Jonathan Dee takes us inside the world of what desire for wealth can do, and cannot do, for the self, the soul, and the family. The Privileges is told with admirable conciseness and yet with great breadth, and the reader is swept along, watching the complications of such desire unfold."—Elizabeth Strout

“Jonathan Dee is at once an acerbic social critic, an elegant stylist, and a shrewd observer of the human comedy."—Tom Perrotta

"The Privileges is a pitch-perfect evocation of a particular stratum of New York society as well as a moving meditation on family and romantic love." —Jay McInerney

★ 08/01/2022

How does one disappear in a city full of people? This is the problem facing the narrator of this latest from Pulitzer Prize finalist Dee (The Privileges). Dee introduces us to…well, we don't know who. All we know of our nameless narrator is that he is on the run for stealing a sum of money he believes will last him the rest of his life. To cover his tracks, he changes his name and abandons everything that can be connected to him. The best place for him to hide? A city. On Sugar Street, to be exact. But it turns out that people and connections to them are not so easy to avoid. Over time, while he continues to "hide," his interactions with the people around him increase until they reach the point where the walls of his isolation crumbles, and he is discovered. Though we never find out his name or very much about him, his voice and his story are compelling. VERDICT 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.—Michael F. Russo