Sure, blame the monster
THE MONSTERS OF TEMPLETON
By Lauren Groff
384 pp. Hyperion $24.95
Reviewed by Julie McGuire
Twenty-eight-year-old Wilhelmina Sunshine Upton, the engagingly witty primary narrator of Lauren Groff’s The Monsters of Templeton, is in trouble. An affair with her dissertation advisor at Stanford has left her pregnant. Willie also faces charges of attempted manslaughter for trying to kill Stanford’s dean of students—the professor’s wife—with a bush plane while on a dig in Alaska. Desperate, the brilliant graduate student does the one thing she swore she’d never do: she flees California for the safety of her small hometown.
Willie’s return to Templeton—modeled on Groff’s own hometown of Cooperstown, New York—coincides with the death of the town’s 50-foot monster, Glimmey. The media invade the town. Droves of summer tourists visiting the baseball hall of fame and museum relish the opportunity to witness a true Loch Ness Monster. Templetonians, however, know Glimmey’s demise has upset an ancient balance. Willie muses:
Templeton has become sad, we think. Templeton feels dark this summer . . . Secretly, in our deepest of our deep hearts, we think it is the monster’s fault. As soon as it died, our lives spiraled down.
Touching the dense, fine hair of the monster’s corpse, which she compares with peach fuzz, Willie remembers an experience in her teens:
I slipped to the country club docks at midnight with my friends, and, giggling, naked, we went into the dark star-stippled water, and swam to the middle of the lake. We treaded water there in the blackness, all of us fallen silent in the feeling of swimming in such perfect space. I looked up and began to spin. The stars streaked circular above me . . . I was only a head, a pair of eyes. As I touched the beast I remembered how, even on that long-ago night, I could feel a tremendous thing moving in the depths below me, something vast and white and singing.
Willie mourns Glimmey, and her once-promising career in archeology. She is longing for comfort from her fun-loving mother, Vi, but instead finds that her mom has been born again, has denounced her hippie, free-loving past for spiritual truth and moral reckoning, and has become obsessed with prayer and redemption. Vi has also reinvented all Willie believed to be true about her family origins. Instead of continuing to maintain that Willie is the daughter of one of three men Vi regularly slept with on a commune in San Francisco, Vi confesses that Willie’s father is a prominent Templeton man, one who, like Willie through her mother’s ancestry, is a direct descendant of Templeton’s founder, Marmaduke Temple. Vi refuses to name Willie’s father. Willie is determined to dig up the truth.
Willie has a number of co-narrators, including James Fenimore Cooper, a native of Cooperstown, who appears as the character Jacob Franklin Temple. Willie is also assisted in the quest for her father by characters from Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales, the noble Natty Bumppo and his best friend, Chief Chingachgook. Other past and present Templetonians—historical and fictional—help her puzzle out the identity of her father. Groff also uses “photographs” and “diary entries” to give the novel a biographical feel.
The Monsters of Templeton is Groff’s first novel; she is well known, however, as a writer of short stories. Many of the chapters in Monsters of Templeton are self-contained tales, but the novel did not seem disjointed. Groff uses the multiple narrators to unearth the town’s many secrets. A blurb on the jacket cover quotes Stephen King: “There are monsters, murders, bastards, and ne’er-do-wells almost without number.” Willie confronts those monsters and murderers to find out who her father is. In the process, she combats her own internal monsters—insecurities, the sense of failure and shame at her wrecked career, the reality of an unwanted child—to find her authentic self.
I was captivated by the delightful and poignantly vulnerable Willie, but have mixed feelings about The Monsters of Templeton as a whole. Groff’s execution and plotting was unique and interesting, yet I found myself bogged down by the novel’s lack of a focused theme, and confused by the many branches of the Temple family. I frequently referred to the family tree Willie creates while she is narrowing the field of Templeton men who could be her father. Groff may have intended the family tree as a device to allow readers to feel they are aiding Willie in her quest. I found myself distracted by flipping pages to consult the diagrams.
This literary mystery is Groff’s homage to her hometown. There are the obvious references to its famous author and the popular tourist site The National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum. There are subtle references as well. Groff tells us in an author’s note:
One winter when I was an adult and very far from my hometown, I’d awaken every night heartsore, haunted by dreams of my calm little lake. I missed my village the way I’d miss a person. This book came from that long, dark winter; I wanted to write a love story for Cooperstown.
Groff’s beautiful descriptions of the lush landscape of Templeton will resonate with those familiar with upstate New York. Strangers to the area will find pleasure in the lyrical writing about a region abounding in history. Despite Monsters’ sometimes overly complex plot, Groff succeeds in writing a story that honors the richness of her birthplace.
Julie McGuire is a litigation paralegal. Her personal essays and poems have appeared in the Christian Science Monitor and several small periodicals. She and her family live in Richmond, Virginia.
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