There is a lake in the town of Templeton, where Lauren Groff’s debut
novel is set. In that lake there is a dead 50-foot-long prehistoric
monster. This may sound like a sufficiently major plot point on which
to hang a story, but for Ms. Groff it’s just a teaser. To the extent
that anything so casual is possible, Ms. Groff’s gigantic dead beast is
a throwaway. And an opening salvo. The creature surfaces not at some
dramatic climax, but in this book’s very first sentence.The sentence reads as follows: “The day I returned to Templeton
steeped in disgrace, the 50-foot corpse of a monster surfaced in Lake
Glimmerglass.” Admittedly, that’s quite a well-baited hook. The reader
instantly wonders who the narrator is, why she is in disgrace and what
kind of strange, spooky place Templeton is. To that last question,
there is a clear though complicated answer.Templeton is, first
of all, a major character for Ms. Groff. It’s also another name for
Cooperstown, N.Y., where she was born. Cooperstown was first given this
pseudonym by its most famous resident, the novelist James Fenimore
Cooper, who also gave the name Marmaduke Temple to his own father,
Judge William Cooper, the town’s founder. Long after Judge
Cooper moved there in the late-18th-century, Cooperstown would become
home to the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum. The similarities
between the two towns are such that Templeton also has a National
Baseball Hall of Fame. But Ms. Groff’s novel, “The Monsters of
Templeton,” is so jampacked and busy that it treats baseball, as it
does the monster, as a minor feature. Instead, Ms. Groff’s
dramatic emphasis is on genealogy. Her main character is Willie Upton,
a 28-year-old free spirit who has come home from Stanford University
to Templeton because she is in dire straits. The facts that Willie
seems to be pregnant by her married archaeology professor and that she
tried to run over his wife, Stanford’s dean of students, are enough to
explain why she has relocated in a hurry. But Ms. Groff’s real reason
for coaxing Willie home is so the
book can watch her climb the
many-limbed Temple family tree.Willie is the daughter of Vi, a
46-year-old ex-hippie who is involved in a squeaky-clean romance with
her clergyman. But Vi was once a tie-dyed wild thing, to the point
where she always told Willie that any one of three candidates could
have been her father. Now Vi springs a surprise: She does
know the
identity of Willie’s father, but she’s not telling. The man is still a
citizen of Templeton, so this revelation would be awkward. “It wouldn’t
be fair to him,” Vi tells her infuriated daughter. But it would be
fair, by the book’s rules, if Willie could do her own prodigious
detective work to find him.Thus “The Monsters of Templeton” gets
going, fueled by only one real clue: Willie’s father is a Temple. (So
is her mother.) And Willie begins piecing together Temple family lore.
To Ms. Groff’s credit, this is an exceptionally audacious gambit,
especially for a first novel. It leads her to write in the lost voices
of many different historical figures, starting with Old Man Marmaduke,
who marvels that “a man such as I, a once-unlettered maker of puncheon
and barrel, could build himself from nothing and become great.” Ms.
Groff gets a boost from the actual Fenimore Cooper style at moments
like this, though the reader need not know exactly when she is drawing
on his Leatherstocking Tales.The fact that Marmaduke had blue
eyes and red hair turn out to be diabolically helpful to Willie’s
investigation. Blue-eyed, redheaded babies had a way of turning up
unexpectedly in Templeton, which makes Marmaduke a contender for not
only multiple paternity but also for a place in this novel’s title.The high
point of Ms. Groff’s mock research is a packet of secret letters,
marked “Contents disturbing and painful,” written between two
genteel-sounding women. The letters begin politely, but quickly and
artfully descend into darkness. Once their secrets come to light, let’s
just say that Templeton’s head count would have been higher with
neither of these women around. Plot twists like that one are
certainly intriguing enough to captivate readers. The trouble with “The
Monsters of Templeton” is that its complications seem nonstop. Does the
town really need a monster and ghosts and
eerie Temple family portraits? (“You rapscallion,” Willie says
endearingly to one of them. “I think we know your
little secret, my old
friend.”) How many illegitimate pregnancies can one book follow? Even
the monster turns out to have been ready to procreate — though at least
no red hair or blue eyes are genetic factors. How many old Templeton
boyfriends can Willie reactivate once she gets to town? How many
subplots, like an out-of-town best friend suffering from lupus, can
accumulate to no dramatic effect, out of thin air?Ms. Groff’s
inexperience shows in this overcrowding, as it does in overly
mellifluous turns of phrase (“the deer darting startled through the
dark”). And she tries out more voices and documents than she can
comfortably create. But it speaks well for her narrative talents that
Willie Upton, disarming and smart, holds even more interest than the
elaborate events that surround her.“The Monsters of Templeton”
is given a
great graphic boost by ingenious illustrations that seem to
authenticate the characters: old photographs from Ms. Groff’s
collection, as well as a computer-generated monster she created using
Photoshop. This book’s handsome, vaguely sinister family-tree visual
design also heightens the impact of Templeton-style hospitality.GET THIS BOOK FREE.BUY SELL RENT BOOKS FROM THE LINK BELOW.
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