Review: The Floundering Time

Some young people can’t wait to enter adult life, some can’t bear to leave their relatively carefree youth behind… and some spend a whole graphic novel examining the last few days of college life and loves. The latter is Katy Weselcouch’s choice, with her first graphic novel, The Floundering Time¹, where we follow two young women, best friends about to pack up their belongings and empty their college bedrooms for good.

Elliott tells Emma he's (almost) a free man

Both Emma and her friend Joey are lesbians, but Emma is currently having a crush on Elliott, a transgender boy who’s trying to break up with his trans boyfriend, while Joey is following a bad girl crush with another bad girl crush. They tell each other everything, support each other, and push each other to not keep their crush to themselves.

The story is told with each chapter following a day in the last week of Emma and Joey’s college life, interspersed with flashback sequences of their student year in Paris. Weselcouch has an interesting way of starting and stopping some of her sequences at points that make the readers feel like they haven’t been given the entirety of the scene, a frustrating but engaging narrative device.

The cumulative but discontinuous narration gives the reader a window (or rather, an ensemble of windows) on these characters, who are defined by how they behave toward each other — while they don’t feel one-dimensional at all, they’re definitely all about relationship. For example, we don’t even know what they study, a bit like in lots of TV shows about college-age people, but thankfully far less vapid. There’s a lens effect brought about by the narrowed themes, a strong focus that feels almost entomological in its relentlessness.

Another striking choice is that while (almost) only queer relationships are covered, the book is (also mostly) not about being queer. Emma and Joey do relate to queer issues, as we see when they attend an LGBT student meeting in Paris, but throughout the book, they don’t talk about being not-straight, whether together or for example with the trans characters, as if that particular issue was already solved for them. Good for them, I’d say. Maybe the book could be called “post-queer”, in that aspect.

Katy Weselcouch’s art looks a bit stiff to me, but the storytelling is solid. Knowing that she did zines from her teenage years made me realize there’s a sense of DIY in those pages, far removed from mainstream aesthetics. This artist wouldn’t feel out of place among, say, the contributors to Three. Her writing is even better. In fact, it is simply very good. She gives Emma, her main character, a self-awareness that doesn’t feel at odds with her unability to sit down with Elliott and tell him how she feels. In fact, she’s shown as a real person, complex and contradictory. Of course, the fact that this story, narrated by Emma, is built from real-life events and people doesn’t hurt its believability. The diary aspect of Emma’s retelling of her story is also helped by the hand-written text, in a cursive and regular style that feels like you’re reading someone’s personal correspondence.

The Floundering Time is a good addition to the corpus of stories about queer people on the verge of adulthood. I do hope we’ll see more of Katy Weselcouch’s art and writing.