Oedipus Wrecks : FICTION : MASON’S RETREAT,<i> By Christopher Tilghman (Random House: $22; 274 pp.)</i>

There was a time when novels could be written about families, and if they were very good, the reader would be left at the end feeling: Just so, this is what the family is about, and perhaps this is what the universe is about. Microcosms sprouted nicely out of macrocosms.

Nowadays, although family novels are written in great quantity and some are very good, the second stage falters. Families, a few of them, may send out the same signals, but the universe has got its lines tangled. The signal it sends back is: Count on very little support from me.

Half a dozen years after “In a Father’s Place,” a collection of excellent short stories, Christopher Tilghman has written a family novel whose rich surface detail is utterly undermined, not in ironic postmodern fashion but by something deeper. Nothing is certain; there is no vantage point and no order, other than the bubble and flux of the generations. Instead of a mosaic, it is a kaleidoscope. The pieces tumble and shift and no design holds.

The distinctive thing about “Mason’s Retreat” is that its flux engages us. The pieces in Tilghman’s kaleidoscope--Edward and Edith Mason and their young sons, Sebastian and Simon--are sharp, faceted and gleaming. They shift and fall with such subtlety and suddenness that we feel their patternless tumbles not as a lack but as a dramatic affirmation. Through them, an indifferent universe grips us as urgently as the reassuring one ever did.

“Mason’s Retreat” begins in 1936 and ends in 1939, at the outbreak of World War II. It opens with the expatriate Mason family aboard the legendary French liner Normandie. They are returning to America from Manchester, England, where Edward owns a machine tool factory that has all but collapsed in the wake of the Depression. The move means defeat for Edward and uncertainty for his hitherto docile wife, Edith, and their two young children.

Funds for the return--the flamboyant Edward has them traveling first class--have been provided by Edith’s wealthy father. The old man disapproves of his son-in-law, and the money comes with a poisoned ultimatum. Edward must settle on the run-down dairy farm on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, a languid remnant, in those days, of the Old South--which he inherited from an aunt, and must make it pay within a year.

The Masons stay three years at the Retreat, as the farm’s decrepit manor house was named in the days when it was making a stab at grandeur. The transplanting produces a ferment in the family’s internal balance; power and loyalties shift and shift back, patterns are subverted and rearranged. It is three years of dissolution and eventual tragedy.

Edward, a deracinated American who fancies himself at home in English society, is at a loss among the Eastern Shore’s down-at-the-heel Southern gentry. The cold masculine precision of his factory suited him; the mud, smells and animal fecundity of the farm panic him. In a marsh of calvings and udders, he feels engulfed by the female principle.

Consulting books, he attempts a brief flurry of reforms against the advice of his able farm manager. Three cows die from a new feed formula; his neighbors are politely scornful of his plans to improve the bloodlines. Humiliated, with winter coming, he retreats to his ice-cold bedroom, his mind already back in Manchester. Britain has begun to rearm; suddenly, his factory, making parts for airplanes, is turning around.

Edith encourages him to return. He jumps at the idea; at the same time--such are the emotional rip-tides of a strained marriage--he resents what feels like an eviction. It is, if not entirely a conscious one. For the first time Edith has found independence in the challenge of restoring the house, getting down a garden and entering an odd, feudal partnership with the Retreat’s two black servants. In Edward’s absence she assumes her own sovereignty; she also finds a lover.

It is only an interregnum; after a year Edward is back. His factory is booming, and the British have sent him as an informal agent to rally political support in Washington for President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s policy of Anglo-American cooperation. But he must return and this time his family must go with him. Edith temporizes but cannot resist.

The resister is the teenager Sebastian. Elusive, injured in some invisible way, he has since childhood conceived of himself as the secret agent within the family. His target is his father; he has worked in various ways--small and then not so small, unconscious and not so unconscious--to widen the split between his parents. The move to the farm had meant Edward’s effective abdication; Sebastian tries to fill the gap by apprenticing himself to Robert, the black hired hand, to learn how to farm. Now he works out a desperate and touching scheme to ensure that Edward goes back to England without the family. The plan succeeds, but only through tragic irony.

Tilghman’s writing can approach the bewitching. Maryland’s Eastern Shore, the scene of some of his finest short stories, is unforgettably rendered. Scene after scene has a magical rightness. The desolation of the rotting manor house on the night the exiled Masons arrive gives way to a comforting order next morning, when Loretta and Valerie, the two servants, walk in and set to work.

Here and elsewhere there is something more than the descriptive detail. Tilghman evokes a ghost of the frequent childlike dependence of Southern families upon their black servants. But he also gives us the Loretta within Loretta, along with the loyal retainer, the woman of many sorrows who bitterly calls for the day that her people will find justice.

As the Masons’ fortunes shift, so do the currents of family attachment and the betrayal that inheres in such attachment. Edward is betrayed by Edith’s infidelity, Edith by Edward’s decision to take her and Sebastian away from the Retreat. Sebastian is betrayed by his mother’s acquiescence. And finally there is Simon, the youngest, who longs only to be with his father and who, in the story’s sorrowful denouement, finds himself left behind with his mother in America.

Simon is the least-formed of the novel’s characters, but he is its narrative mainspring. Tilghman gives the story at two removes. The teller is Simon’s grown son, years later. His account is gleaned from his father’s efforts to recapture his childhood and explain to himself its painful mysteries.

It is an inspired device. Tilghman is after the indeterminacy, the ambiguity, the apparently chance and contradictory meanings in a family’s story. Each of the characters drops from one pattern to the next. The hand that holds the kaleidoscope is Simon’s. Like us, he possesses a memory composed of brilliantly vivid pieces. Like us, turning and turning, he seeks a design and connection that continually change and elude him and, through him, the reader.