2023-04-22 22:00:11
Jonathan Dee is professor of creative writing and literature at Columbia University, New York; he was critic (and associate editor) at the Paris Review, famous literary magazine. Is it the habit of reflecting on the texts of others and on narrative issues in general that gives the sixty-year-old American the perspective and quiet precision with which he talks about his own texts in the Parisian café where the French publication of Sugar Street ? This is his fifth novel translated into French, and his eighth book. This book breaks with the precedents by two obvious characteristics: it is rather short – when Privileges, The factory of illusions, Mille excuses (Plon, 2011, 2012, 2013) and Those from here (Les Escales, 2018) had accustomed us to thick volumes and ample stories – and has a single narrator speaking in the first person – against a multiplicity of voices until today.
Still, this novel about a man on the run, having broken with his past, counting on living until his death with the 168,548 dollars he has in his pocket, does not fail to create echoes with the previous texts of Jonathan Dee. While discussing with him about his book, whose protagonist, on the road, swapped the GPS too likely to inform him against a good old road map, we endeavored to define the cardinal points of a rich work.
America
Admittedly, the mania for discerning, in any novel from the United States, the “portrait” or the “corrosive criticism” of this country sometimes seems like a reflex. Notwithstanding, such fictions exist, heirs to a long tradition. Jonathan Dee admits to being in their wake, he who places Sugar Street in the shadow of the canonical Walden or life in the woodsby Henry David Thoreau (1854), and designates John Dos Passos, author of the trilogy U.S.A. (1930-1936), as the writer who influenced him the most. His novels give us news of the country and when they are written.
The promise of the American dream and its derailments figure prominently in Privileges as in The factory of illusions or in Those from here, the first evoking the obscene profits of the world of finance, the second the advertising turn taken by politics in the 1980s and 1990s, and the last looking at the beginning of the 2000s, from September 11 to the Occupy Wall Street movement . Written before Donald Trump came to power, Those from here even seemed to announce this, through the election of a billionaire and populist mayor, busy dismantling public services, while the resentment of the white middle and working classes was exacerbated, considering themselves aggrieved.
You have 71.26% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.
#map #United #States #drawn #Jonathan #Dee