On the Tobacco Coast

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. Agent: Henry Dunow, Dunow, Carlson & Lerner. (Apr.)