A Stranger in the Kingdom by Howard Frank Mosher (1989. Mariner Books. ISBN 978-0-618-24010-4)
As I said before when reviewing Where the Rivers Flow North, Mosher’s short story collection that I also picked up at Green Mountain Books and Prints in Lyndonville, VT on a recent road trip from Minnesota to Maine, I love to buy local fiction when I travel. Sometimes I am disappointed by the quality of the writing. But, often times I am amazed that the author I’m reading hasn’t become more widely known. Mosher falls somewhere in between those two sentiments: His work is well known amongst fans of literary fiction and Vermontaphobes (new word alert!) but not so much by mainstream readers or flatlanders like me. In any event, he is, now that I’ve had the chance to read both his short story collection and his seminal novel, A Stranger in the Kingdom, a writer on par with Faulkner or Cather when it comes depicting landscapes as character.
Here, Mosher puts us smack dab in Kingdom County in the 1950s. Quiet, bucolic, a land of fluttering maple leaves turning crimson amongst the rounded old mountains near the Quebec border, the County would seem to be about as impossible place as there is to find good old fashioned racial tension during the time before Brown v. Board of Education. But when Rev. Walt Andrews, a black Presbyterian minister and his son, Nat, arrive in Kingdom to minister to the local congregation, well, some of the residents of the County aren’t particularly hospitable to the stranger who doesn’t look at all like the residents whose families have lived in the Green Mountains for generations. An exception is Charles Kinneson, editor of the local newspaper and an elder in the church, and his immediate family, including Charlie, his namesake and the town’s playboy, roustabout, and defense lawyer. There’s a cast of other Kinnesons in the story; including the narrator and youngest son of Charles, Sr., Jimmy; and Ruth, wife of Charles, Sr. and mother of the two Kinneson boys; as well as other memorable human characters.
With deft precision, the novel’s plot begins as an unassuming narrative of life in the mountains and ends as a fast paced courtroom drama. There’s the obligatory victim of a heinous crime, Claire LaRiviere, whose brutal death is predictably pinned by Mason White, the rangy, craggy faced do-nothing sheriff bent on re-election, on the County’s only black man. Always the black man. That’s an obvious plot twist any reader will spot coming from a mile away so I’m not spoiling anything here by revealing it. But the arc the story takes once Rev. Andrews is arrested makes for entertaining and fascinating reading despite its predictability.
This is regional literary fiction at its best: not only because of the memorable characters major and minor who are brought to life and propel the story by Mosher’s great skills as a writer; but because the landscape behind the people looms as the overriding character in the tale. A fine piece of writing.
4 and 1/2 stars out of 5.
