Nothing sweet on Sugar Street: It’s creeps all the way down. An unsettling, propulsive, sometimes acidly funny book.
A mystery man on the run alights in a grim and unwelcoming new world.
“$168,048. That's a lot, though it doesn't really matter how much it is once you've accepted that there will never be any more of it, only less.” Exactly how much cash he has left in the manila envelope under his car seat, later under his mattress, is one of the only things we ever know for sure about the unnamed White male narrator of Dee's eighth novel, and it's an element of the furious tension that drives the book to its brutal conclusion. The narrator tosses out a number of provisional backstories—he has a “nifty law degree,” he’s some kind of terrorist, he had a daughter with a terminal illness—which don't seem to necessarily be true, though every once in a while he does make a claim on the reader’s credulity: “I think it’s important to note that I didn’t ruin anybody. I just want that on the record, even though, of course, there must be no record.” Having cut every connection to his past life, he goes to ground in an unnamed decaying city, renting a room from an unfriendly tattooed woman named Autumn. She tells him there's a middle school nearby—because, she explains, he looks like a sex offender, so maybe he should rent somewhere else. His relationship with her becomes the center of his weird new life, but it, and every other interaction he has with the people he meets, seethes with mistrust and violence. He is acutely aware of the diseases plaguing his country, and his narration bristles with minimanifestoes. “Democracy, capitalism, liberalism: all in the lurid end-stages of their own failure, yet we won’t even try to imagine anything different, any other principle around which life might be organized: we would sooner choke each other to death, which is basically what we’re doing.” “If white people had a tombstone, it would read, ‘They Stopped at Nothing.’ ” This pronouncement will be borne out by his own story.
Nothing sweet on Sugar Street: It’s creeps all the way down. An unsettling, propulsive, sometimes acidly funny book.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-8021-6000-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Oct. 3, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2022
A touching portrait of courage and friendship.
A lifetime of friendship endures many upheavals.
Ellie and Homa, two young girls growing up in Tehran, meet at school in the early 1950s. Though their families are very different, they become close friends. After the death of Ellie’s father, she and her difficult mother must adapt to their reduced circumstances. Homa’s more warm and loving family lives a more financially constrained life, and her father, a communist, is politically active—to his own detriment and that of his family’s welfare. When Ellie’s mother remarries and she and Ellie relocate to a more exclusive part of the city, the girls become separated. They reunite years later when Homa is admitted to Ellie’s elite high school. Now a political firebrand with aspirations to become a judge and improve the rights of women in her factionalized homeland, Homa works toward scholastic success and begins practicing political activism. Ellie follows a course, plotted originally by her mother, toward marriage. The tortuous path of the girls’ adult friendship over the following decades is played out against regime change, political persecution, and devastating loss. Ellie’s well-intentioned but naïve approach stands in stark contrast to Homa’s commitment to human rights, particularly for women, and her willingness to risk personal safety to secure those rights. As narrated by Ellie, the girls’ story incorporates frequent references to Iranian food, customs, and beliefs common in the years of tumult and reforms accompanying the Iranian Revolution. Themes of jealousy—even in close friendships—and the role of the shir zan, the courageous “lion women” of Iran who effect change, recur through the narrative. The heartaches associated with emigration are explored along with issues of personal sacrifice for the sake of the greater good (no matter how remote it may seem).
A touching portrait of courage and friendship.Pub Date: July 2, 2024
ISBN: 9781668036587
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.
A falsely accused Black man goes into hiding in this masterful novella by Wright (1908-1960), finally published in full.
Written in 1941 and '42, between Wright’s classics Native Son and Black Boy, this short novel concerns Fred Daniels, a modest laborer who’s arrested by police officers and bullied into signing a false confession that he killed the residents of a house near where he was working. In a brief unsupervised moment, he escapes through a manhole and goes into hiding in a sewer. A series of allegorical, surrealistic set pieces ensues as Fred explores the nether reaches of a church, a real estate firm, and a jewelry store. Each stop is an opportunity for Wright to explore themes of hope, greed, and exploitation; the real estate firm, Wright notes, “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks.” But Fred’s deepening existential crisis and growing distance from society keep the scenes from feeling like potted commentaries. As he wallpapers his underground warren with cash, mocking and invalidating the currency, he registers a surrealistic but engrossing protest against divisive social norms. The novel, rejected by Wright’s publisher, has only appeared as a substantially truncated short story until now, without the opening setup and with a different ending. Wright's take on racial injustice seems to have unsettled his publisher: A note reveals that an editor found reading about Fred’s treatment by the police “unbearable.” That may explain why Wright, in an essay included here, says its focus on race is “rather muted,” emphasizing broader existential themes. Regardless, as an afterword by Wright’s grandson Malcolm attests, the story now serves as an allegory both of Wright (he moved to France, an “exile beyond the reach of Jim Crow and American bigotry”) and American life. Today, it resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world.
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-59853-676-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Library of America
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
BOOK TO SCREEN
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