Helen Yglesias is a talented writer. Her prose is alive and buoyant; her language both yields and demands, forming by its deceptive ease a shape that holds the reader's inner eye. Yet Sweetsir is not compelling; it seems uprooted and lacking in context. It feels as though it is floating in literary space. Panels of prose are simply laid out side by side—The Early Life of Sally Stark, The Life of Sally and Sweets, The Death of Sweets, The Trial of Sally Sweetsir—each panel given equal weight as though, equally and together, the curiously stitched sections will tell the story—and indeed, they do tell a story, but not the story.

The metaphoric subject of this book is the psychic history of two human beings who come together, thrash wildly about in an attempt to reduce their mutual isolation, fail miserably and are punished brutally for...