Mason’s Retreat (Magill Book Reviews)

At a glance:

Having established himself as a major voice in short fiction with his collection of stories, IN A FATHER’S PLACE, Christopher Tilghman here looks to make his place as a novelist—and he succeeds quite nicely.

MASON’S RETREAT, first of all, is an historical novel. Tilghman sets his novel in the America of the 1930’s, a crucial historical and dramatic moment, for it greatly affects the conditions and welfare of the novel’s central family. Edward and Edith Mason, and their two boys Sebastien and Simon, are transplanted Americans who return to their home country from England in 1936. Edward, an industrialist, has lately known hard times and hopes to achieve a sort of familial recovery by coming back to the family estate—Mason’s Retreat—on Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay. At the same time, he is looking to get his own financial fortunes back on track in the prewar economy.

The trip back to America—the “retreat,” as it were—first proves fortuitous. The old estate retrieves some of its old productivity; the eldest son, Sebastien, feels himself moving toward manhood; Edith embraces a new kind of individual freedom and discovers a different womanly identity. Yet circumstances also bring hardship. The “ghosts” of the family’s past seem to haunt the mansion’s new inhabitants; the landscape invites not only adventure and freedom but also disaster.

Part of the problem is that the family already is fractured along certain lines. Sebastien aligns himself with his mother and resents his father’s presence (and absence); Simon feels closest to his father and possesses his father’s more stolid nature. The familial tensions heighten when Edith ventures into a new relationship, learning new truths about her womanhood. The novel actually centers upon Edith and Sebastien, as both develop separate emotional attachments that devolve into separate kinds of catastrophe.

Eventually, the family falls apart in more than one way. Because the novel is “imagined” by Edward’s grandson, Harry, readers are allowed a glimpse of events that occur beyond and after the main chronological frame of the novel. Thus, readers get a satisfying sense of the course the family history takes down into the present. What they also get is a very satisfying first novel from Christopher Tilghman.

Sources for Further Study

Booklist. XCII, April 15, 1996, p. 1423.

Boston Globe. April 7, 1996, p. B33.

Kirkus Reviews. LXIV, February 15, 1996, p. 258.

Library Journal. CXXI, March 1, 1996, p. 106.

Los Angeles Times Book Review. April 7, 1996, p. 2.

The New York Times Book Review. CI, April 28, 1996, p. 13.

Publishers Weekly. CCXLIII, February 12, 1996, p. 58.

San Francisco Chronicle. May 19, 1996, p. REV5.

The Times Literary Supplement. July 5, 1996, p. 22.

The Washington Post Book World. XXVI, April 7, 1996, p. 3.