On the Tobacco Coast
A Novel
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
The culmination of Christopher Tilghman’s great Chesapeake saga, a story spanning four centuries of an American family.
It is the Fourth of July 2019, and the Mason family is gathering at their historic Chesapeake farm, Mason’s Retreat. It isn’t everyone’s favorite party, but Harry Mason has once again goaded his wife, Kate, and their children into hosting a celebratory dinner. Their oldest, Rosalie, is having trouble with her marriage; the youngest, Ethan, is in the throes of a fitful first relationship. In between, Eleanor despairs over her stalled novel, a fictionalized memoir of the wife of the first Mason settler, who landed there in 1659.
Kate, recovering from a second round of chemotherapy, is at the center of this ritual of remembrance. Tart and candid, she asks her husband, “What crime against humanity did your family not commit on that land?” And so it is more or less inevitable that when the clan, joined by a cast of neighbors and French cousins, sits down for dinner, the question of how they should think and feel about their past comes to the fore.
Told with irony and deep insight, On the Tobacco Coast is Christopher Tilghman’s concluding meditation on the themes of his novels about this ancestral monument: pride and shame in its long history, the persistence of family stories, race and privilege, the enigmas and customs of regions. It reflects on the state of America today, with its battles over its own history and efforts to reckon with the wrongs of the past while looking forward to an uncertain, more just future.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Tilghman concludes his Chesapeake Bay quartet (after Thomas and Beal in the Midi) with this understated yet consequential drama of an American family's reckoning with its colonial heritage. The story centers on an Independence Day celebration at Mason's Retreat, a house on a former tobacco plantation on Maryland's Eastern Shore that patriarch Harry Mason purchased decades earlier after his father had sold it off. His wife, Kate, whom he met while she was a burgeoning lefty at UC Berkeley and he was an MBA student at Stanford, feels uneasy about the Masons' legacy of slaveholding and displacement of Native Americans and sees no cause to celebrate, though she's happy to be reunited with her adult children Eleanor, Ethan, and Rosalie as she recovers from chemotherapy. Novelist Eleanor is also focused on the past, though she worries readers will be turned off by the slave-owning protagonist of her new book. Rosalie, the oldest of Kate and Harry's children, harbors resentments toward her husband for letting her shoulder the brunt of their childcare duties, while Ethan, the youngest, contends with his girlfriend's indifference toward him and the family. Tilghman demonstrates particularly keen insight in his depiction of Kate, as she faces the challenge of poaching a 13-pound salmon while confronting the "forces in the house that resisted change." It's a satisfying end to a rich saga.
