About the Author
HOWARD FRANK MOSHER is the author of ten books, including Waiting for Teddy Williams, The True Account, and A Stranger in the Kingdom, which, along with Disappearances, was corecipient of the New England Book Award for fiction. He lives in Vermont. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Kirkus Reviews
A usual cast of rural eccentrics peoples the latest from Vermont writer Mosher (Northern Borders, 1994, etc.), as he highlights a crucial summer for an orphan boy whos come home from college in the 1950s to prepare himself for the seminary. In little Kingdom Common, the heart of Kingdom County, young Frank Bennett sees that not much has changed while he was away, except that foul-mouthed, ballplaying Father George, the hotheaded priest who raised him, has lost much of his fire. A series of tasks the ailing priest has set out for Frank charts the course of the summer, starting with attempts to rein in the free-spirited ``village idiot,'' who talks to his shadow, tries to kiss a moose on a bet, and finally vanishes from town in a blizzard. Frank's efforts meet with similar success when hes charged with overseeing a blithe young daredevil, a redheaded Irish girl excited to new heights by the arrival of a traveling circusshe upstages the acrobats on the flying trapeze and then runs off with the show. A darker side of life is reflected in Franks trip to Staten Island to visit the former owner of the Land of the Free Emporium, a Chinese man run out of town by those feeling the pinch of his entrepreneurial prosperity. And when an absent-minded Mr. Mentality comes to Kingdom Common to do a mind-reading show, his rage at not receiving his full fee translates into a terrifying public display of all the town's secrets. But the real story of the summer involves the local fortuneteller and a girl with laughing eyes who becomes Father George's housekeeper, and whose face Frank cannot put out of his mind. Capraesque storytelling bursting with juice and flavor, a novel as charming as it is colorful, even if it is at times a bit too predictable. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Mosher is back in his ficticious town of Kingdom Commons, Vermont, once again telling enthralling stories imbued with love of the land and the people, however eccentric. When Frank Bennett comes home from college in the late 1950s, his adoptive father, Father George Lecoeur, gives him tasks to help him follow his heart and decide his future. In chapters that could stand alone, Frank teaches the citizenship class when Father George is too tired to do it and looks after town savant Foster Boy Dufresne, who is searching for a woman to love; teenage orphan Molly Murphy, who wants to run away and join the circus; and visiting illusionist Moriarity Mentality, whose last performance leaves townspeople thunderstruck. At the heart of the book is Father George, town priest and historian (whose A Short History of Kingdom Common runs to more than 3,000 pages), legendary baseball player and former whiskey smuggler. This loving description of a small town in an earlier time should delight Mosher's fans and win him new ones. Michele Leber --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Amazon.com Review
In his novels Northern Borders and A Stranger in the Kingdom, Howard Frank Mosher has displayed a magical command of New England's terrain, not to mention its rustic inhabitants. The Fall of the Year finds him at it again, waving his writer's wand over a tiny section of the north woods. His narrator, Frank Bennett, has returned home to Kingdom Common, Vermont, after graduating from college during the late 1950s. Despite the impending construction of a nearby ski resort, this minuscule village remains as bucolic as ever: Truth to tell, few of the three hundred or so Commoners who lived in the village proper had the slightest inclination in downhill skiing anyway. Our principal recreations were still trout fishing and deer hunting, and they were both very good indeed. It's the Commoners--particularly the more eccentric ones--who make up the heart of Mosher's novel. Frank devotes one chapter to the village's grumbling fortuneteller; another to a fiercely entrepreneurial jack-of-all-trades; and a third to a beautiful baker's assistant, with whom he'd clearly like more than a casual, yarn-spinning relationship. But the true personification of the place would have to be Frank's adoptive parent, Father George Lecouer. When this ex-whiskey smuggler turned priest isn't laboring at his 3,000-page History of Kingdom County, he's dispensing advice to the narrator and setting various bits of small-town havoc in motion. Though some of Frank's tales are predictable, most evince the storyteller's gift for consistent surprise--which makes this Kingdom Common saga an uncommonly fine work of fiction. --Rucker Alex --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
CHAPTER 5 The Land of the Free
Outsiders-French Canadian farmers and mill workers, Irish railroadmen, even teachers and clergymen from Away-have often found Kingdom Common, at least at first, to be a hostile place.
-Father George, "A Short History"
Riding the rattler south through the midsummer night, I read the postcard once more. "Hello Frank Bennett. Send box from Chinese Bank behind bin right of door in Land of Free to 8247 Liberty St. Staten Island New York. I fine. How you? Yr. friend Dr. Sam E. Rong." The message was printed in small red letters precise as typescript. On the reverse was a glossy photograph of the Statue of Liberty at night, torch aglow, the multicolored skyline of Manhattan in the background.
As the eight-car Rattler crossed the height of land south of Kingdom Common and began to pick up a head of steam on the long downgrade toward St. Johnsbury, I wondered again why Sam wanted the rectangular lacquered teakwood box, somewhat larger than a shoebox, full of envelopes with postmarks from Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, Vancouver, Hong Kong, Singapore, and a score of other North American and Asian cities. Why, if it was important to him, would he have left the box behind in the first place? Two days before, right after the card arrived, I'd gotten the key to the padlocked front door of the Land of the Free Emporium from Bumper Stevens and dug the box out from behind the bin by the door. When I'd opened it, it had given off a sharp herbal aroma that I recognized immediately. And at exactly that moment I decided to make the trip from northern Vermont to Staten Island to see my old friend Sam Rong in person.
It had been eight years, but I still remembered the evening vividly. I was just thirteen at the time, and a gang of us town kids were playing a pickup ball game on the common. I happened to glance over at Bumper Stevens, sitting on his three-legged milking stool behind the backstop and calling balls and strikes, and noticed a slender, dark-haired stranger standing nearby in white pants and a white jacket, his arms folded, frowning out at the diamond. He was the first Chinese person I'd ever seen in the Common, but what surprised me even more was my absolute certainty that a moment earlier the man hadn't been there. It was as though the frowning newcomer dressed in white had simply fallen out of the sky onto the village green. Or perhaps materialized, like a genie from a fairy tale, out of the faint blue haze of Bumper's cigar smoke.
"Yes, sir," Bumper said by way of greeting.
"What game?" the Chinese man said abruptly in a disapproving voice.
"That would be baseball," the auctioneer said. "Basey-bally. The great American pastime." "It figures," the man in white said.
Bumper looked at him sharply. But the stranger's face was as expressionless as the pale moon just coming up behind the courthouse tower across the street.
"You no pray basey-bally in Chiny?" Bumper said, not unamicably.
The man in the white pants and jacket gave him a pitying look. "That's the silliest game Dr. Sam E. Rong's ever seen," he said. "Smack ball with stick, run like hell to get back where starting. What jobs you got this burg?" That made Bumper laugh out loud, so on the spot he asked Dr. Sam E. Rong to dinner at the hotel. The next time I saw the Chinese man was the following Tuesday evening at Bumper's weekly cattle auction, where he seemed to be very capably doing several jobs at once: parking farm trucks, selling coffee and hot dogs, brandishing a blue cow cane, and herding doomed Jerseys, Holsteins, and Guernseys from failed local dairy farms into the makeshift wooden ring inside the commission-sales barn, all the while bantering with the auctioneer a mile a minute, giving back everything he got, with interest.
"Chinka chinka Chinaman, settin' on a fence, tryin' to make a dollar out of fifteen cents," Bumper chanted into his microphone between herds. "Fifteen cents, fifteen cents, who'll start off the bidding on this sorry-looking Chinaman in the white coat for fifteen cents?" "Ha," Sam replied from atop the high board enclosure of the auction ring, coolly surveying Bumper and the crowd. "Red nose auctioneer too old too fat too full cheap beer to sit on fence at all." "Chop chop chop! Wrastle that next bunch of critters in here pronto," Bumper roared into the mike over the general laughter.
"Chop chop yourself," Sam said in a plainly audible voice as he jumped lightly off the fence into the sawdust and opened the gate. "Sam E. Rong's the only fella does anything chop chop round this joint. Bump Steve ever try too move chop chop, have thundering big brain stroke, wind up six feet under Celestial Kingdom. Then Dr. Rong run auction, things round here get done right for change." Soon Sam was holding his own iiiiin Bumper's after-hours poker games, too. For the first several weeks he'd watched the players, gone to the cooler at his own unhurried pace to fetch them beer, and conducted a constant running repartee with Bumper. Then Sam began to sit in, keeping track of his winnings on a tall red abacus with green wooden rings. Of course the abacus amused the auctioneer and his cronies, who continued to laugh and shake their heads the following spring when Sam used part of his poker winnings to buy the disused feed store on the edge of Little Quebec and opened the Land of the Free Emporium.
"Chinka chinka Chinaman," I yelled out as I raced past Sam's place that summer. "Settin' on a fence!" "Boy!" he called back sharply. "Snooping young neighborhood boy, always round where not supposed to be. Why you scared of Sam?" "I'm not scared of you," I yelled back from a safe distance.
"Are too. You scared because you very, very ignorant. Tell what. Make self useful, you going to spy on Dr. Rong every waking minute anyway. Run home for twenty-two rifle, hurry back. Got job for you to do." I ran home with no intention of doing what he had asked, for I was frightened half to death by Sam, as well as fascinated by him. But when I got home, Father George, who'd overheard my taunts, ordered me in no uncertain terms to get the hell down to Sam's with my .22 before he horsewhipped me all the way back there himself.
"I-I don't want to." "You don't want to! Of course you don't want to. You're ashamed. I would be, too, if I were you. You goddamn well ought to be ashamed." "I don't like the way he looks at me." "What you mean is, you're scared of him because he's different. Well, Frank, I guarantee that Sam Rong won't hurt you. But you are by God going to help him out, starting this afternoon, or I will know the reason why." Which was how, the summer I turned fourteen, I went to work for Sam Rong, waging war on the colony of rats that had taken up residence in the abandoned feed store. When the rats were gone, I swept out the old wooden bins and helped Sam paint the exterior of the store red, yellow, and green. Over the summer he added swooping eaves and a pointed cupola. After the renovations were complete, the store resembled a jerry-built pagoda. A pagoda on the edge of a French Canadian enclave in a northern Vermont village!
"Ha," Sam exclaimed, delighted by the irony, as he painted "The Land of the Free Emporium, Dr. Sam E. Rong Prop" in shiny black letters over the entrance. On the inside walls of the store, on a sixty-foot-long scroll of blank newsprint that Editor Kinneson gave him, Sam began drawing a pen-and-ink representation of market day in a Ming dynasty village. The town, which had a rectangular central green and bore just enough resemblance to Kingdom Common to make me hope Sam might be parodying our village, was crowded with merchants, fishermen, barterers, wrestlers, musicians, bricklayers, carpenters, revelers, storytellers, aristocrats in sedan chairs, hunters, warriors, potters, silversmiths, and children. A fat cattle drover with a long goad looked suspiciously like an Oriental Bumper Stevens. A sharp-featured woman haggling over a turnip resembled Louvia the Fortuneteller.
Here and there on his tableau, as the spirit moved him, Sam inscribed proverbs of his own composition in red ink.
"You, Frank Bennett. Listen. This says, all the time a fella spends fishing can add on to life at the far end. That's how much older he'll live to be. You like to fish? Come here early tomorrow morning." The following day Sam showed me how to set wire traps for northern river eels in the Kingdom River under the Irishtown railway trestle. That evening he fried up a tasty meal of moo gew eel kew in a wok made out of a discarded hubcap from a 1936 GM farm truck. Sam nodded at the fishing proverb on the scroll. "See?" he said. "Add two, three hour spent catching eel today on to other end of our lives. Other words, Frank Bennett, more you fish, longer you live. Very wise proverb, eh? I pay you in wisdom. Better than cash." At fourteen, I was skeptical about this proposition. But I liked Sam Rong from the start, and soon we became good friends.
Before it was a feed store, the building had been a tenement for French Canadian mill workers. Sam took up living quarters in the rear, in an enclosed porch overhanging the river. He heated the store with a coal-burning Glenwood parlor stove that he bought from Bumper Stevens at a farm auction in Lord Hollow. Besides cattle feed, which Sam purchased in bulk from grain cars coming in from the Canadian West, he sold garden seeds, horse liniment, and his own brand of bag balm, good not only for sore cow udders but, as Dr. Rong liked to say, for whatever ailed you, including cuts and bruises, arthritis, hemorrhoids, even infant teething. He stocked a few staple grocery items like rice and noodles. From Hong Kong he imported a line of durable, inexpensive work shoes. He sold fifty different kinds of homemade medicines compounded from pennyroyal, mint, wild ginger, gill over the ground, goldenthread ... --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From The Washington Post
"...in Howard Frank Mosher we have a novelist who not only knows every acre of his terrain -- the hills, streams and woods of northern Vermont -- he also has his eyes set on something loftier: the very mysteries of human existence. Mosher's novel is filled with placid and elegant descriptions of nature, at times reminding me of a prose pastoral symphony. But people, not maple trees and trout streams alone, make a novel breathe, and this -- his talent for creating lively, living characters -- is Mosher's greatest gift." --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Review
A usual cast of rural eccentrics peoples the latest from Vermont writer Mosher (Northern Borders, 1994, etc.), as he highlights a crucial summer for an orphan boy whos come home from college in the 1950s to prepare himself for the seminary. In little Kingdom Common, the heart of Kingdom County, young Frank Bennett sees that not much has changed while he was away, except that foul-mouthed, ballplaying Father George, the hotheaded priest who raised him, has lost much of his fire. A series of tasks the ailing priest has set out for Frank charts the course of the summer, starting with attempts to rein in the free-spirited village idiot,' who talks to his shadow, tries to kiss a moose on a bet, and finally vanishes from town in a blizzard. Frank's efforts meet with similar success when hes charged with overseeing a blithe young daredevil, a redheaded Irish girl excited to new heights by the arrival of a traveling circusshe upstages the acrobats on the flying trapeze and then runs off with the show. A darker side of life is reflected in Franks trip to Staten Island to visit the former owner of the Land of the Free Emporium, a Chinese man run out of town by those feeling the pinch of his entrepreneurial prosperity. And when an absent-minded Mr. Mentality comes to Kingdom Common to do a mind-reading show, his rage at not receiving his full fee translates into a terrifying public display of all the town's secrets. But the real story of the summer involves the local fortuneteller and a girl with laughing eyes who becomes Father George's housekeeper, and whose face Frank cannot put out of his mind. Capraesque storytelling bursting with juice and flavor, a novel as charming as it is colorful, even if it is at times a bit too predictable. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP.
All rights reserved. Kirkus Reviews
"Father George raised an adopted son, Frank Bennett, whose common-sensical point of view makes him an ideal narrator. Each exchange between the two is a small story in itself, in dialogue so right that you feel like you're eavesdropping on a small, special world." The New York Times
"Mosher's novel is filled with placid and elegant descriptions of nature, at times reminding me of a prose pastoral symphony. But people, not maple trees and trout streams alone, make a novel breathe, and this -- his talent for creating lively, living characters -- is Mosher's greatest gift. " -- reviewed by Sudip Bose The Washington Post
"I have always enjoyed reading the novels of Howard Frank Mosher, and I was especially taken by The Fall of the Year, which brings together in one book all of his considerable strengths. His principal character, Father George Lecoeur, is easily among his most durable creations. Mosher's language--always a pleasure to read--attains a level of astonishing grace and beauty here as he brings Kingdom County to life once again. Mosher writes with a narrative power and moral intensity that recall John Steinbeck at his best, and it is high time he were ranked among the finest writers of our time." -- Jay Parini, author of Robert Frost: A Life
"Few writers create characters as wondrous and idiosyncratic as Howard Frank Mosher--and fewer still offer us stories with as much grace and humor and heart. He is, pure and simple, one of the very best we have." -- Chris Bohjalian, author of Midwives and The Law of Similars
"I have been a fan of Howard Frank Mosher since his astonishing Where the Rivers Flow North. He is a wonderful writer, and in the Fall of the Year he takes the gritty materials of Kingdom County and builds a novel of enchantment. The chapter called "The Daredevil" is one of the grandest set-pieces I have read in years. -- Ward Just, author of A Dangerous Friend
"Howard Frank Mosher is, for my money, the most natural storyteller around, and any new book of his is cause for joyous celebration. The Fall of the Year, which is impossible to read without recalling the best tales of Washington Irving and Mark Twain, is no exception." -- Richard Russo
"The Fall of the Year is a lyrical celebration of the natural world and the mysteries of human nature. As intelligent as it is generous, this is superb storytelling, a delightful novel filled with humor and grace, real people and miracles, love and loss." -- Alice Hoffman, author of Here on Earth and Practical Magic
"I read The Fall of the Year by lantern light in a tent thirty miles from Cody, Wyoming, bbut I expect the effect would have been as magical as if I'd been home. As younggggg Frank Bennett peels the layers from the history of Kingdom Common, a place where the rivers flow north and the evening skyglow is either an illusion or the distant reflection of Montreal, we see the secrets of the human heart in his lost village, the ugly and beautiful truths which vex and redeem us. The interplay of village characters in the light and dark times of Frank's awakening make this a special book. Let me just say it: I love Howard Mosher's writing." -- Ron Carlson, Author of The Hotel Eden and Betrayed by F. Scott Fitzgerald
"Howard Frank Mosher continues to bring alive Kingdom County, Vermont, not just with a cast of endearing and entertaining people, but with such an eye for nature that the reader can hear maple leaves shiver in the wind, brook trout splash in a forest pool. But this time, he's thrown together the most wonderful mixture of ingredients: love, magic, mystery, humor and sadness, all simmering in the same book. Imagine what would happen if Grandma Moses and William Faulkner got together and invented a town." -- Cathie Pelletier, author of Beaming Sonny Home, The Funeral Makers, and Once Upon a Time on the Banks
"A little bit of heaven can be found in the mountains of northern Vermont, a place populated by eccentrics, fortunetellers, small-minded civic functionaries and a man who just might be God. The village of Kingdom Common is the setting and centerpiece of Howard Frank Mosher's elegiac new novel, THE FALL OF THE YEAR." The Chicago Tribune
"You won't find Kingdom County on any official maps, but in his five previous novels Mosher created a literary landscape as textured as anything produced by the U.S. Geological Survey. A fine regional novelist who deserves wider recognition, Mosher writes stories, almost folk tales at times, built out of lost and forgotten history, rooted in a strong sense of place, inhabited with colorful characters. His terrain may be specific, but his themes are universal...in Mosher's hands, Kingdom County is full of all kinds of wonderments." USA Today --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
