Sabrina by Nick Drnaso

of Kerstin Ostheim, a journalist who investigates gruesome horse killings, and P. J. Banner, a photographer with a cocaine habit. After meeting on a dating app and seeing each other for six months, the middle -aged couple decide to get married. P. J. must learn to take responsibility and confront his denial and addiction in order to support Kerstin and Schuld, her transgender daughter from her first marriage, while Kerstin herself must navigate her family’s Nazi past and privileged position as a settler. Sprinkled with Swahili and German, and awash in poetic description of place, Odhiambo creates a sensual world where witch doctors offer proverbs with matterof -fact humor and mechanics find wisdom in Aristotle, only to be interrupted by tweets and text messages that join the flow of the narrative to bring the historical and the contemporary side by side. These juxtapositions form the warp and weft of the novel. Consider the relationship between Kerstin and P. J., which parallels that between Schuld and her boyfriend, Woloff, an Olympic medalist struggling with a knee injury. Through these comparisons and connections, Odhiambo brings into stark relief various degrees of intergenerational trauma as each couple bumps against the ideals and norms of their elders. He shows us how violence is passed down and resonates in small, biting ways, creating a complexity and nuance that infuses the novel from beginning to end. At times, Odhiambo’s grip on description is loose and digressive, foraying into detail that is heavy-handed, but ultimately, it serves to enrich the world of Ogweyo’s Cove, where “spotty pearls of sun peak through cracks in the foliage” alongside the rhythm of house music and East African slang like “bones” and “chop chop.” Smells Like Stars is a timeless story of those who must fight for their love beyond all understanding, including their own. Taking hints from Zadie Smith’s NW, it is also a search for meaning in the face of oppression rooted in overlapping histories, upbringings, and families both given and chosen. Shazia Hafiz Ramji Vancouver, British Columbia Nick Drnaso Sabrina Montreal. Drawn & Quarterly. 2018. 203 pages. It’s no secret that graphic novels have come of age in the twenty-first century in the sense that they are now taken seriously by readers and reviewers. No longer do we point to Maus and move on. In the case of Nick Drnaso’s Sabrina, the first graphic novel to make the longlist for a major literary prize, the Man Booker, the power of the graphic novel to dissect and examine our cultural moment is indisputable. The plotline is simple: a woman we meet briefly disappears and eventually is revealed as having been murdered. But it is not the suspense of the plot that holds us, nor is it the minimalist drawings. There are no artistic pyrotechnics here, and Drnaso never varies from a fairly routine grid design. But he clearly demonstrates that quotidian life in post–9/11 America is anything but simple. Sabrina disappears in Chicago after some brief scenes with her sister Sandra. Her boyfriend, Teddy, goes to Colorado to stay with an old high school friend, Calvin Stroebel, a programmer for the air force. They were never close friends, but they are both going through crises—the loss of a girlfriend and the end of a marriage. In many ways, they are each the definition of isolation, even though neither they nor we know what is going through their minds. Cal is required to fill out periodic DOD mental-health surveys requiring responses that range from one to five and end with a yes-or-no question about whether he wants to see a clinical psychologist. The minimalism of the survey mirrors his clueless taciturnity. Teddy is a basket case and barely communicates except via a loud scream after occasional nightmares. The reluctance to examine feelings is nothing new in literature, but Drnaso’s genius is in depicting how one incident and its aftermath, Sabrina’s murder and the way the information is revealed and disseminated via the internet excites a portion of the population to reach out to these men. Conspiracy theorists, haters, skeptics, indeed pretty much anyone who has...

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