Customer Reviews

It Is Time, Lord (Voices of the South)

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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.