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All the Best Stories are About Love
On Kingdom Mountain
By Howard Frank Mosher
Houghton Mifflin, 2007. 276 pages.
Reviewed by Michael Wilt
Somewhere along the line a few years ago I picked up a copy of Howard Frank Mosher’s novel In the Fall of the Year. I think it was at a book trade show. It was maybe another two years before I actually cracked the book open and read it, then smacked myself on the head and asked “What was I waiting for?,” and undertook to read the rest of Mosher’s work.
So now, having just read his latest book, On Kingdom Mountain, I have enjoyed all of Mosher’s nine novels as well as his travel memoir, North Country. And now, like all other devoted Mosher readers, I’m stuck here waiting for the next novel, which I hope won’t take more than a couple of years to arrive.
Mosher’s tales are set mainly in Vermont’s Northwest Kingdom on the U.S.-Canada border and in the environs of Lake Memphremagog, which spans both countries. His stories always have a bit of height while not being actual tall tales. Characters who are somewhat larger than life populate his pages to delightful effect with ornery traits and homegrown notions of how to live in a border country that maintains a delicate balance between lawful and outlaw-ful. Bootleggers, local despots, gypsies, holy innocents, snake-oil salesmen, artists, tilters-at-windmills, and incredibly learned local folk work their ways through picaresque plots that are captivating and hilarious.
Miss Jane Hubbell Kinneson is the chief eccentric of On Kingdom Mountain. The day she turns fifty in 1930, she meets a stunt pilot/rainmaker/bank robber, Henry Satterfield, who is on the trail of a $100,000-in-gold Civil War treasure that just might be hidden on Kingdom Mountain, land that Jane owns and of which she is the only human resident, and which she is fighting to protect from the encroachment of a highway to Canada.
But we don’t need to consider the storyline here. It’s a good one, and I wouldn’t want to take the chance of spoiling it for you—it’s got courtroom drama and a torrential rainstorm and lovers who are so delighted that they are delightful and a riddle and a treasure hunt and cast of characters from the present and the past who never stop surprising you. This website is called Nimble Spirit, though, so I should probably comment on some of the “spirituality” of the book, or more precisely the theology, as it is found in the life and work of the wonderfully incorrigible Miss Jane.
Jane is an opinionated bookworm. Henry David Thoreau is dubbed The Pronouncer of Concord. William Shakespeare is The Pretender of Avon (she’s an Oxfordian on the authorship question, but she’s so lovely that I can forgive her lapse). But much of her bookish energy has been spent since the age of eighteen on the project of creating the Kingdom Mountain Bible, an edited and annotated version of the “pernicious Bible” produced by King James, for, as Jane explains in epigrammatic fashion, “Every generation should have its own Bible.”
When she reached “the biblical age of adulthood,” Jane explains,
I began to realize that very little of the King James Bible made a particle of sense. In particular, I couldn’t swallow the loving, all-powerful father who allowed his only begotten son to be strung up on a cross and tortured to death just to prove a point. And blasted two whole cities—infants, toddlers, and all—from the face of the earth to punish a few bad apples. . . . No, sir. This madness had to be the work of King James, not a just and magnanimous deity, and must not be allowed to stand. When I turned eighteen, I had a most unfortunate experience with King James the First and his Bible. That is when I decided to revise it and his detestable Jehovah. In my Kingdom Mountain Bible, old Jehovah is a jolly, good-natured fellow. He helps his dear people when he can and doesn’t stand in their way the rest of the time. Sometimes their shenanigans amuse him or make him happy or sad. That’s all right. Every family, you see, should write its own revised Bible.
Miss Jane’s revision techniques range from cross-outs to additions to midrashic marginal notes.
“Horsefeathers” was Miss Jane’s most dismissive pronouncement. It adorned the margins of Genesis, punctuated the wild outcries of the Old Testament prophets, and accompanied the mainly crossed-out text of Paul’s stern letters.
Jesus undergoes revision as well. “First I eliminated from the conversation of the young schoolteacher—for I have no doubt that he was no nail driver but, with his great love of hearing himself talk, a schoolmaster—all references to Hell, of which there are many in King James’s corrupt version. Hell is a vicious notion put in Jesus’s head by his lunatic cousin, John Baptist.” The Sermon on the Mount, though “unimpeachable as it stands,” still requires a bit of help: “I only tacked on a few womanly sentiments that no man could be expected to think of. Whatever else he was, Jesus, you know, was very much a man’s man. . . . I added, for instance, ‘Live each day not as if it is your last, but as though it is the last day of the lives of the people you meet.’”
Miss Jane’s theologizing through the Kingdom Mountain Bible is a seriously comical aspect of her character and her approach to living. Her exegetical comments are laugh-out-loud bits of wisdom that pour light on standard understandings that the institutional powers-that-be prefer to leave unquestioned. Heretic hunters would of course excommunicate her, which would matter little owing to her lack of interest in anything having to do with church. Jane is an exemplar of a kind of religious fearlessness that is uncommon in our day.
Mosher weaves Jane’s theology and all of her other eccentricities seamlessly into an unrelenting narrative with multiple conflicts, colorful characters, and discovery upon discovery. “All the best stories are about love,” according to Jane, and this one, like all the rest of Mosher’s work, proves her point. Love of place, of nature, of adversaries—love of living.
Now, while I wait for novel number ten, I’m sure I’ll dip back into the books on my Mosher shelf, and also watch—again—the films that director Jay Craven has made of three of them: Where the Rivers Flow North, A Stranger in the Kingdom, and Disappearances. I hope Craven doesn’t think his work is done. On Kingdom Mountain would make a heck of a movie.
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