BOOK REVIEW / FICTION : A Small-Town Tale of Strange Southern Gothic : PRIVATE ALTARS, <i> by Katherine Mosby</i> , Random House, $21, 336 pages

Relatively new fictional villages such as Cicely, Alaska--hometown to the self-consciously offbeat philosophers of “Northern Exposure”--and the milk-and-cookies surrealism of old standbys such as Mayberry, N.C., have nothing on “Private Altars,” a first novel by Katherine Mosby. Nor does the gaudy late ‘80s and ‘90s parade of fiction set in small towns--and often celebrating their supposed bizarreness.

For sheer eccentricity, “Private Altars,” as the saying goes in the South, can run with the big dogs.

Indeed, “Private Altars” in part descends from one of the biggest dogs of them all in small-town mythology, Sinclair Lewis’ “Main Street,” published in 1920, a lastingly influential portrait of small-town intolerance of individuality.

Like Carol Kennicott, Lewis’ heroine, who has the misfortune to marry a closed-minded physician and move from Minneapolis to Gopher Prairie, Minn., Vienna Daniels, Mosby’s heroine, forsakes her New York blueblood background for Winsville, W.Va., and the Heights, her husband’s decaying, edge-of-town estate.

Like Carol Kennicott, Vienna offends her husband and the town by challenging the social conventions of her village and is ostracized. (One of her first offenses is brusquely correcting a friend of her husband, who insists that George Sand was a man.) Like Carol, Vienna suffers a dire fate.

But there the lineage ends, for “Main Street” relies for its effects on mounds of realistic and plain-spoken detail--detail so convincing that generations of writers (and their readers) have succumbed to the generic notion that small towns are black holes of intolerance, sucking in any free spirit who happens by. “Private Altars,” with its menagerie of strange characters and goings-on and its Latinate prose, reads like a Southern Gothic of Henry James.

The strangest character of all is Vienna Daniels. Artfully moving forward and backward in time, while always remaining in a heightened Now, the novel follows Vienna from her arrival in West Virginia in the late 1920s, as a 20-year-old bride with dressing gowns from Paris and a marble bust of the Roman rhetorician Quintilian, on through the Depression and the greater part of World War II.

Deserted by her dashing yet boorish husband while she is pregnant with their second child, Vienna happily becomes a gossiped-about recluse, relying on her maid and her two remarkably precocious children, Willa and Elliott, for what little companionship she desires. Vienna translates Latin poetry and works diligently for 15 years on an epic poem.

Smitten by an Oxford botanist who arrives at the Heights a stranger, she converses with him in Latin, wages a torrid affair at every locale on the estate but her bedroom, and assuages her grief--he is improbably killed by logs falling off a truck--by becoming an unpaid surgeon for Winsville’s trees. As if that isn’t enough, Vienna buries her son (who dies after his head strikes a half-buried spade), in his bird cemetery, to the strains of Mozart’s Requiem.

In fact, the circumstances of Elliott’s death and burial strike at the heart of Mosby’s major preoccupations, which are suggested as well in the title.

Elliott dies because town authorities force Vienna to send him to school--she had been home schooling him--where an intolerant teacher and school bullies share responsibility for his death. The “private altars” of the title refer to what is sacred both to Vienna and her children--unbridled imagination, the freedom to march to one’s own drummer, to learn the secret language of birds, as Elliott does.

These sacred ideals of the artistic temperament collide, as they too often have in American fiction, with the alleged banalities of the great unwashed--the Main Streets, the Babbitts--leaving little room to explore the complexity of all human behavior, including small-town mores.

It comes as no surprise that Willa, now a teen-ager, flees the town to which she feels greatly superior, or that Vienna and her epic poem face Armageddon entirely in keeping with the Gothic flamboyance of the story.

Vienna’s oversimplified dichotomy between the sacred and the profane strands her in a hackneyed climax that carries none of the author’s intended tragic weight.

Mosby, a teacher in New York City, is a published poet, and “Private Altars” is distinguished by apt metaphors, imaginative perceptions and precise language.

This is prose of a high order, and Mosby can reach these heights consistently, creating a density of language that borders on being an extended prose poem, as in this description of Vienna in her house at night:

“Vienna sat at the head of the table and listened to the house breathe its almost perceptible sigh of wood expanding or settling, ticking behind walls and under floorboards like an old dog dreaming. Somewhere a fly scuffed against a windowpane, tiny and insistent, its fury irregular and insignificant, absorbed into the quiet night. Sound too, had its palette, the myriad minutiae blending, like an auditory equivalent of black, into the meaningless blur of silence.”