It Is Time, Lord

Chappell's first novel belies the author's age. He was a mere twenty six years old when IT IS TIME, LORD was published. One thinks of Hemingway, also twenty-six when THE SUN ALSO RISES was published, and the energy and mastery of technique he evinced early on.A better analogy, though, would probably be James Joyce, whose PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN, provides clear correlations with Chappell's novel. Both are concerned with young artists, writers, struggling to come to terms with the weight of their pasts and in those attempts trying to turn experience into art. Each youth labors under the shadow of a forceful, not always sympathetic father. Chappell does something here, way back in 1963, that not many other subsequent novelists have been able to do, at least not in my estimation, and that is to justify use of the present tense narrative form. Too many writers today use the technique as a showy gimmick, but Chappell is not playing around here. The present tense narrative of James Christopher's dissolute present life is starkly contrasted with his rural upbringing, told in the form of an aborted memoir, but in each we can see the seeds of James's self-destruction.IT IS TIME, LORD also plants the seeds for Chappell's later quartet of autobiographical novels beginning with I AM ONE OF YOU FOREVER and recently concluding with LOOK BACK ALL THE GREEN VALLEY, and this first novel makes for a compelling warm up for those fine books.

The brilliance, energy, and labrynthine interweavings of this book are thoroughly humbling. While it is true that Chappell wrote the novel when he was young and perhaps not as well-developed as he later became, the raw youthful passion and overt sincerity with which he wrote more than balance any lack of experience as a writer. We, as readers and writers, are lucky to have this book back in print after what has clearly been too many years. The almost painful voyeurism the reader is forced into by reading about the narrator's infidelities and failures creates a powerful psychological drama that will haunt and yet intrigue from page one to page one hundred and eighty-three. Throughout the novel, the reader is exposed to intense flashbacks into the narrator's childhood and his relationships with his various family members (most importantly his father)on a rural North Carolina farm. These, when juxtaposed with the equally intense main story, create a lachrymose landscape that nobody could read without deep emotion.