There is a lake in the town of Templeton, where Lauren Groff's debut novel is set. In that lake there is a dead 15m prehistoric monster. This may sound like a sufficiently major plot point on which to hang a story, but for Groff it's just a teaser. To the extent that anything so casual is possible, 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 [15m] 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 Groff. It's also another name for Cooperstown, New York, 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 Groff's novel, The Monsters of Templeton, is so jam-packed and busy that it treats baseball, as it does the monster, as a minor feature.
Instead, 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 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 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." 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.
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