Fathers and sons, mothers and wives

IN flight from a life in England beleagured by disappointments of his own making, Edward Mason brings his disappointed wife and their two sons back to the United States. "Edward Mason," we are told, "is one of those men who believe a fine appetite is something to give thanks for." It seems an odd opening observation on a character we know nothing about, but Christopher's Tilghman's first novel, Mason's Retreat (Chatto, £9.99 in UK), is a curious book of jumps and lulls.

Tilghman sets out to tell the story through the random third person musings of Mason's grandson, who displays a diffident almost wary interest in his family history. As a technical distancing device, it almost works, in an interestingly inconsistent way. Edward quickly emerges as a ne'erdo well with pretensions rather than dreams. He returns to the United States on an expensive ocean liner; we first meet him as he stands on deck, "wearing a suit made of yards of heathery Irish tweed, and the fronts of his double breasted Burberry, flapping slightly, are as big as sails".

Mason is not romanticised "he has made certain promises, mortgaged all to the French Line for this last extravagant passage, and by God, except for a little too much vibration from the propeller, shaft, the Frogs are delivering the goods."

The depiction of Edward as a not particularly sympathetic if genteel loser is skilfully handled. Yet Tilghman's prose at times lumbers awkwardly. He changes tenses with abandon, and there are some passages more suited to supermarket romance, the staccato sex in particular. The novel suffers from the fact that Tilghman's short story collection, In a Father's Place (1990), is superior, and far more gracefully written. Considering the quality of those stories, Mason's Retreat is deeply disappointing. It might have fared better as a long short story; as it is, it creaks along in sequences marred by technical confusions. Still, the plot, gradually overtaken by the subject of war, lends itself to these mood shifts, dabbling as its does in romance, the often static politics of marriage, adventure, family history and tragedy. The novel suffers from authorial mixed intentions, from vagueness, from an attempt to be several things at once while failing to be anything in particular. It is difficult to believe that the writer who wrote the title story of In a Father's Place also wrote Mason's Retreat.

Central to this novel is the dead relationship between Edward and Edith. Resigned to tolerating Edward's behaviour, Edith has reached a stage of apathetic serenity and is prepared to give it one more last chance. The couple have two sons, a worried, solitary teenager who loves his mother and dislikes his father, and a happy, younger boy. The device of calling upon the grandson at intervals to act as witness fails when Tilghman attempts to make the grandson reexperience a story he has been told many times. "Harry knows that this story, told to him over and over again for reasons he can barely imagine, is now his to tell his own children, to be taken well or badly, to be believed wholly or in part, like a kiss." Grasping after a mythic effect, Tilghman lapses into prose that often barely makes sense.

The characterisation of Edith is initially extremely well handled. She emerges as an intelligent, ironic woman whose dreams have come to nothing, but she is shrewdly detached enough to see that this is due to her situation which has begun to be farcical. Here she is sitting in her cabin, thinking about the next move: "When Edward announced, about six months ago, that he had decided to return to America to take over the family farm, she thought he was joking. They were living at the time in a huge borrowed flat that seemed abandoned, even with them in it. Anything would have been better than that, and it seemed to her that he was acknowledging this fact with a rather ironic, though bitter, twist. She laughed as she had not done in quite a while; when things were good, much of what Edward said was funny. He was a man who sparkled when successful."

Initially the theme of nationality and identity seems important, and Tilghman presents the dilemma of being caught between two countries very well. Edward who "left his America by design, fuelled by disdain", appears obliged to stress that the America he left ten years ago has changed, in order to justify his returning to it ". . if America is now a different place, that gives him license to return. Edith left her America rather carelessly, cast it off in an extravagant display of youth. She was only twenty, and moving to England seemed glamorous and fun .. . Her marriage and expatriation had shocked her family and friends ... but she had never intended to turn her back on them, or on America."

The characterisation of Edith is the real strength of the book; she is resigned but not defeated. Her son Sebastien is bewildered; old enough to know that something is seriously wrong, young enough to show fear. As the family travel to the States, the adventure of entering the unknown temporarily reunites Edward and Edith. The arrival at the estate in Maryland, illustrating the difference between expectation and reality, is vividly described. "The place was huge, the rooms vast and square; it was Victorian, not Georgian. It seemed more than anything to have been inspired by the overgrown villas of the French Riviera ... but a window had not been opened in years, and the air that night was the worst of it, thick with the odors of neglect: mold and moth, rot and rust. Long strips of Chinese wallpaper hung off the walls in spirals as if left over from a gay party. An animal - not a mouse or a rat, but something large, like a fox or a dog - had died long ago in the center of the hall, leaving only the black stain of its dried juices and a moldy skeleton."

This is an infuriating novel; more awkward than subtle, it is engaging, nostalgic, often predictable, occasionally cliched, and certainly has its moments of melodrama. It has been erroneously compared with The Great Gatsby and, even more outlandishly, with Faulkner; more realistically, it reminds one of John Updike at his more muted. It is a goodish, quiet first novel, catching the randomness of life. If it does nothing else, it serves to remind readers of the quality of In a Father's Place, stories which share Richard Ford's vision and meditative tone, exploring the drama of the undramatic.