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.
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.
Templeton turns out to have had more than its share of two-legged monsters, once Willie begins putting together her evidence. In a family tree that branches out to include slaves, American Indians (Fenimore Cooper's Chingachgook, the Mohican chief, and his son Uncas) and maybe even the pack of guys who go on shared morning runs and wave fondly at Willie, there are more than a few miscreants along the way.
The high point of 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?
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 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.
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