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Overview
A New York Times Book Review Notable BookThe year is 1936, and the world is on the brink of war. American expatriot Edward Mason, owner of a failing machine factory, is fighting more private battles. In the face of defeat, he abandons his adopted home in England in order to reclaim his inheritance on Maryland’s Eastern Shore---a ruinous, thousand-acre estate known ominously as Mason’s Retreat. Edward, his wife, Edith, and their two young sons struggle to adjust to life in this strange and storied place. But with war drawing closer, England’s hasty rearmament offers Edward a chance to revive the factory, and he returns alone to lead his company. Meanwhile, his wife and sons are left to make their own fortunes. When an unsigned letter informs Edward of where those fortunes have led, he hastens back, an ill-fated move that will have devastating consequences for everyone involved.
Haunted, moving, and masterfully written, "Christopher Tilghman’s deeply remembered novel is a loyal testament to history---to the lure and bind of family, to the earth that spat us out and receives us unquestionably again" (Gail Caldwell, The Boston Sunday Globe).
Synopsis
A New York Times Book Review Notable Book
The year is 1936, and the world is on the brink of war. American expatriot Edward Mason, owner of a failing machine factory, is fighting more private battles. In the face of defeat, he abandons his adopted home in England in order to reclaim his inheritance on Maryland's Eastern Shore---a ruinous, thousand-acre estate known ominously as Mason's Retreat. Edward, his wife, Edith, and their two young sons struggle to adjust to life in this strange and storied place. But with war drawing closer, England's hasty rearmament offers Edward a chance to revive the factory, and he returns alone to lead his company. Meanwhile, his wife and sons are left to make their own fortunes. When an unsigned letter informs Edward of where those fortunes have led, he hastens back, an ill-fated move that will have devastating consequences for everyone involved.
Haunted, moving, and masterfully written, "Christopher Tilghman's deeply remembered novel is a loyal testament to history---to the lure and bind of family, to the earth that spat us out and receives us unquestionably again" (Gail Caldwell, The Boston Sunday Globe).
Editorials
From the Publisher
"Powerful...A work of surpassing thematic seriousness and fictive artistry. In all respects, Mason’s Retreat is exemplary."---The Washington Post Book World "Stately, absorbing...Mr. Tilghman writes [with] authoritative elegance….His book, so rooted in the idea of coming home, makes one realize all over again that here on Earth there is no such place."---Thomas Mallon, The New York Times Book Review
"Comes close to pure, exhilarating perfection...Tilghman gives us richly drawn characters, shimmering detail, and an irresistibly moving theme---all presented in a graceful and powerful style."---San Francisco Chronicle
"Rich...bewitching...unforgettably rendered...The pieces in Tilghman’s kaleidoscope [are] sharp, faceted, and gleaming."---Richard Eder, Los Angeles Times
"Beautifully written...fully imagined...Few first novels are narrated with the clarity, economy, and masterful assurance Tilghman brings to this remarkably moving and persuasive tale."---Entertainment Weekly
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.)Library Journal
The author of In a Father's Place LJ 5/15/90 writes of a family's return to their ancestral land in Maryland after residing in England for many years.School Library Journal
YAEdward and Edith Mason are American expatriates who, after suffering financial reversals in England, return home in 1936 to rehabilitate an old family farm on the Chesapeake Bay. Historical irony foreshadows the narrative, which is framed by reminiscences and suppositions of their grown son, Simon, 40 years after the events take place. After the initial horror at the dilapidated estate, Edith and her two sons adjust to their new life. Simon's sunny disposition endears him to the household staff and the community, and Edith finds peace in the routine of the farm. It is the morose 14-year-old Sebastian who truly comes into his own, working side by side with Robert, the black hired hand who nurtures the boy's aptitude for farming, acknowledges his youthful quest for truth, and never allows his own past sufferings at the hands of Mason ancestors to diminish his compassion. After a ridiculously comic effort at managing the farm, Edward returns to England to run a munitions factory during the war. A habitual adulterer himself, he nonetheless comes home when he hears that Edith is having an affair and makes secret plans to sell the farm and move the family back to England. Sebastian becomes the tragic victim of his mother's self-absorption, his father's delusions, and his own obsessive melancholy. Family secrets and trenchant descriptions of social strata result in high drama worthy of thoughtful YA readers.Jackie Gropman, Kings Park Library, Burke, VAKirkus Reviews
A superb first novel from Tilghman (the collection In a Father's Place, 1990) that portrays with tenacious intelligence and wrenching intensity the nuances of family unhappiness and conflict.The story, set on Maryland's Eastern Shore in the years immediately preceding WW II, is filtered through the memories—and imagination—of Harry Mason, whose grandfather Edward had reduced a successful family business to near-disaster and, in the process, all but destroyed such remnants of his family's preeminence and pride as remained intact in his own embattled wife and children. Their mutual ordeal worsens in 1936, when, after 13 years of Edward's failures as factory owner, husband, and father, they return from England—to the Retreat, "a black hulk of a family ruin" that they laboriously transmute into a working farm that can support the disappointed Edith Mason and her boys, Sebastian and Simon, when Edward again "retreats"—this time to prosperity (his firm manufactures airplane parts) created by the looming threat of war. But in Edward's absence—not excluding the absence they had felt when he was present—the others grow apart from him and also distant from one another, and the downturn in this family's fortunes and fates can't help but worsen. Tilghman's powerful story is distinguished by deep and thoughtful characterizations (especially of the lonely Edith and of brooding, watchful Sebastian), and by an incisive understanding of the varieties of family dynamics that extends even to the smallest things parents and children tend to notice about each other. The narrative has a single serious flaw: Recurring hints promise a full revelation of some great wrong in the Mason family past, but, excepting a single act of insane cruelty, none is forthcoming.
Still, echoes of The Great Gatsby, William Styron's Lie Down in Darkness, O'Neill, and Faulkner add further resonance to a novel that stands, despite its flaws, as a stunning individual, achievement.