THE RIGHT-HAND SHORE

A return to the Mason estate in Maryland, where an ill-fated family’s hopes are pulled apart by inexorable forces.

Tilghman (Roads of the Heart, 2004, etc.) published the novel Mason’s Retreat, about that property at Chesapeake Bay, in 1996. This new novel returns to the same place and family but is set earlier in time. An act of cruelty—selling the estate’s slaves south just before Emancipation—sets the mood, irretrievably ruining the Retreat for scion Ophelia Mason. Her marriage to scientific farmer Wyatt Bayly sees the acreage turned into a vast peach orchard where Wyatt, "a friend of the Negro," employs Abel Terrell as his assistant. Abel’s clever son Randall is the inseparable friend of Wyatt’s child Thomas, and the boys are educated together and equally, while Wyatt’s daughter Mary is taken to France by Ophelia, who is increasingly living separately from her husband. These tensions between mother and father, black and white, brother and sister, come to a head in 1890 when the peach trees succumb to disease, and Randall turns against Thomas because of Thomas’ love for Randall’s sister. Breakdown, murder and a family split ensue, leaving Mary to her own difficult destiny.

Tilghman’s trademark nuanced observation and insight are abundantly apparent, but there’s no real center to this insistently portentous parable of multiple blight.