Rat_Time_Featured Reviews 

“Rat Time”

By | October 9th, 2019
Posted in Reviews | % Comments

When the Roberts family gets pet rats, a tradition emerges, Rat Time, where for some time in the evening, Keiler Roberts and her daughter, Xia, play with their rats. It’s enough of a daily event for Xia to share at a school show-and-tell. But after their rats die, the meaning of Rat Time changes, it becomes a memory; the time they had rats. In Keiler Roberts’s new book, “Rat Time,” meaning is contextual.

Cover by Keiler Roberts

Written & Illustrated by Keiler Roberts
Keiler Roberts is a droll documentarian, unfaltering in her ability to find humour and levity in her life’s unflattering moments.
Pet deaths and parenting, embarrassing childhood memories and mental illness, Roberts documents her daily life’s minutiae, its up and downs, with the deftness of an observational comedian. Her comics demonstrate that sometimes life can deal you a punch to the gut, but it doesn’t have to be devoid of a punch line.

“Rat Time” is a book of snippets, moments from the day to day minutiae of Roberts’s life. Never quite even stories or anecdotes, it’s a collection of non-events, half conversations, and routine. No scene last more than a handful of pages, giving just a hint of the life led by Keiler and her family. Despite the events in the book being short, simple, and disparate, Roberts maintains a slow, meandering pace, as we sit in the mundanity of the moment. It feels calmly honest, as her slightly rough but simple lines and layouts slide us through her life.

Roberts’s approach takes the inherent staticness of comics to heart, sitting calmly in any moment, each panel being being a preservation of a passing moment, you can sit in it or leave it. Comics is more than just the single moment though, it’s a series of moments, talking to each other. The way those moments, these single, still panels, are assembled together is the art of comics. Roberts chooses big, bare panels in her book, joining together the vignette style of the storytelling with the the micro of the page to page craft to kind of make the sequence less smooth, to trap you in these moments.

The subtle efficacy of Roberts’s approach is remarkable, leaving a book that feels honest and alive. There is no direct exposition, just as there’s no overarching plot, Roberts just dives into vignettes from her life and leaves you to figure out who is who and what is what. The book sits very tightly within her perspective, and she already knows her relationships to her family, friends, and her own identity. “Rat Time” is honest to that perspective, just hinting at things in the overt text, and leaving a lot of emotional context and meaning in the subtext. It’s a really lovely and organic way to build the world that requires a confidence in craft that a lot of creators don’t have.

Things are mentioned explicitly, like Roberts’s physical and mental health struggles, but they aren’t revealed. We see Keiler early in the book in her therapist’s office, asking whether anyone has ever switched chairs during a session. It isn’t until later that she mentions why she is in therapy, her bipolar diagnosis. There’s a similar thing with her MS, it’s mentioned casually later on in the book. These are things that she’s been living with for a while, they’re facts of her life that the people around her know about, so it doesn’t need broadcasting within this slice of her life. Health issues, both physical and mental can be hard to talk to directly, and sometimes when they are spoken about, they can be all consuming of a person (or character on a story). In “Rat Time,” their effects can be seen in Keiler, but never on big, dramatic ways, she is foregrounded as a person before her diagnoses are made clear.

While the perspective is firmly placed in the first person of autobio, the world of “Rat Time” is populated by well drawn other people. Keiler features in almost every panel of the book, so is the person we get the clearest shape of, though Roberts’s approach to character building through subtle suggestion and natural revelation extends to her depictions of the other people in her life, but with the added filter of Keiler’s perspective on them, meaning they’re slightly obscured. We get a sense of her daughter, her husband, her parents, her friends, but don’t get inside them — we can’t. instead, we get mediated pictures of them, filtered through Kieler’s interactions with them. Keiler plays with her daughter, Xia, but doesn’t play the way Xia wants, Roberts writes in the narration that Xia is trying to flip the power dynamic between the two of them, when they’re playing, the kid is in charge. But the book’s power doesn’t shift, remaining firmly in the mother’s eyes. Floating into her memory of her own dolls from childhood, a special box she kept of them, displays she made with them when she was too old to play but not ready to give up on them.

This is a book happening in a world bigger than its author, or its protagonist (who are the same person), but it can’t see beyond her. Within the book, Keiler brings up attempts to write fiction multiple times, but struggles as all she sees in the fiction she writes is allegory for herself, so it feels like a futile obfuscation of truth. But the thing is, even in autobio, the story is still mediated through craft and selection, you cannot have the whole of a person in a book. As readers, we only have the context of what we’re given by the author. There seems to be an understandable hesitance in the portrayals of people outside of Keiler, Roberts only has the full set of information about herself. What this leaves is a sense of alienation from the world around our protagonist, an alienation that doesn’t feel uncommon to certain parts of parenthood and illness. Keiler Roberts builds an idea of herself in changing, loose, and at times intangible contexts. “Rat Time” paints a uniquely interior picture of a person through a series of subtle and innocuous moments.


Edward Haynes

Edward Haynes is a writer of comics, fiction, and criticism. Their writing has been featured in Ellipsis, Multiversity, Bido Lito!, and PanelxPanel. They created the comic Drift with Martyn Lorbiecki. They live in Liverpool, where they hornily tweet for your likes and RTs @teddyhaynes

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