Vasiliy Aksyonov's It's Time My Friend It's Time would not disappoint the devotees of social-realism. On the face of it, the story of the protracted estrangement of a young married couple and their final coming-together, predictably spiced with those elements of romance, of sentiment, of nature-poetry and motherland-prose which belong to this genre, there emerges nevertheless a sharp flavour of something else. It is not just that the heroine is a film-star and that mention is made of such names as Antonioni, but that the style is light, even 'throwaway,' the approach 'cool.' Vasiliy Aksyonov is a more classical author than he pretends to be.