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Time is the Oven is a kind of anti-Western romp, following the adventures of a young man (a boy in Jacob's Cellar) beginning in post-Civil War Missouri. There he meets the legendary Jesse James and is singularly unimpressed, but comes to see his older brother as a sort of mentor. Pursuing a difficult romantic relationship with a "sporting lady" aspiring to become an actress, he meets only disappointment, marries a respectable woman and seeks unsuccessfully to return to the rural life of his youth. Following a family tragedy and estrangement from his wife, he undertakes an odyssey to Panama during the failed French canal project, eventually returning, definitely older and arguably wiser, to Missouri for unanticipated reunions at the novel's dramatic conclusion. Although in some respects a sequel to Jacob's Cellar, the novel is a stand-alone romance inspired by Frank Jame's love of Shakespeare, with a plot reminiscent of "A Winter's Tale."