Mason's Retreat

This superb novel by the author of In a Father's Place confirms Tilghman as one of America's finest writers. Set on the Eastern shore of Maryland, on the eve of World War II, the story concerns the decline of the once-grand Mason family.

Publishers Weekly

Christopher Tilghman. Random, $22 (336p) ISBN 0-679-42712-0 A magnificent meditation on the dynamics of family relationships and the consequences of selfishness and pride down through generations, Tilghman's first novel places him securely in the ranks of our most accomplished writers. In 1936, at the height of the Depression, a nearly destitute Edward Mason, his business in England on the verge of bankruptcy, his marriage shaky, decides to return to America to try to wrest a living from his family's estate on Maryland's Eastern shore. The Retreat, as the mansion is called, is a rotting derelict, and the 1000-acre farm is badly in need of cash and a firm hand. With the help of two black servants, Edward's dutiful wife, Edith, restores the house; hostile, restless Sebastien, 14, discovers his identity on the farm, working alongside Robert, the black laborer, learning to sail and feeling himself centered and fulfilled for the first time. Hard-shelled, blundering Edward hates the place, however, and when war seems imminent in Europe, he returns to England to revitalize his factory by making aircraft parts. Simon, the Masons' second son, is devoted to his father and misses him terribly, but Sebastien thrives. Edith, who has been betrayed by Edward in the past, begins an affair with the son of an arriviste (the antithesis of the Mason preoccupation with class distinctions). When a newly prosperous Edward learns of the liaison and returns, determined to bear his family back to England, it is wrenchingly clear to Edith that in restoring the nuclear entity she will nurture Simon but deprive Sebastien of his spiritual haven. Sebastien's desperate strategy to avoid leaving the farm, ironically futile in any case because his father has secretly betrayed him in yet another way, crests on the current of portent that ripples under Tilghman's lyrical, resonant prose. As in his luminous story collection, In a Father's Place, Tilghman elegantly evokes both the physical landscape and the hermetic society and inbred culture of the Chesapeake Bay area, where old families live at the edge of ruin and distinguished bloodlines are all that is left of a proud and arrogant way of life. In supple and beautifully inflected prose, he makes astute observations about the enduring blight of racism, the fallibility of human nature, the sacrifice of children as hostages to fortune and the inevitability of retribution-all conveyed with an illuminating, unflinching but compassionate eye. (Apr.)

Family Voices

"The Retreat," says Christopher Tilghman, "is modeled after my family's farm in Maryland. Tilghmans were all over the Eastern Shore in the 17th and 18th centuries, for the most part enriching themselves at the expense of others. They were prominent in the Revolutionary War mostly because they were tired of sharing their abundance with the king. Since then they have steadily declined, but the farm through certain miracles and detours has remained in the family."

Tilghman, who now lives with his wife and three sons in rural Massachusetts, began writing after graduating from Yale and serving briefly in the Navy. When publishing success at first eluded him, he earned a living at a sawmill in New Hampshire, and built a post-and-beam house with hand tools on a hilltop in Vermont. Moving back to the more urban environment of Cambridge, Massachusetts, he became a corporate copywriter and sometime journalist before publishing In a Father's Place, a highly-praised collection of short stories. Mason's Retreat is his first novel.