“The Monsters of Templeton” is a mystery, flavored with bits of coming of age. It is historical fiction that includes ghosts and a lake monster, and a tale of love and friendship. It was blurbed by Stephen King and Lorrie Moore, two very different writers who both love finely crafted stories.
Lauren Groff hits a home run in her first at-bat, with a novel that is intriguingly constructed and compulsively readable.
Willie (Wihelmina) Upton is returning in disgrace to her hometown of Templeton in upstate New York. She is supposed to be in Alaska, “blowing lichen off definitive proof that human culture existed there over 35,000 years ago.” But instead she’s walking into her childhood home, Averell Cottage, looking like “some little chick, starving, molting, kicked out of the nest for late-discovered freakishness.”
Her mother, Vi (Vivienne), first thinks Willie is a flashback, a lingering aftereffect of her hippie youth. When Willie tells her that she thinks she’s pregnant, that her academic adviser is probably the father and that she can’t go back to Stanford because she tried to run over his wife, the dean of students, with a bush plane — her now born-again mother is understandably disappointed.
Then she tells her daughter, “I’m going to sleep for as long as I can sleep. And when I wake up, we’re dealing with this.”
Vi’s concern is well-rooted. She’s traveled the road Willie faces and worked hard to make sure her daughter would not. Vi had run from Templeton to San Francisco at 15 after discovering that her mother planned to send her to finishing school. She returned in 1971, at 17, after her parents were killed in a car wreck. Not even her impeccable lineage — she is a direct descendant of the town’s founder, Marmaduke Temple and his novelist son, Jacob Franklin Temple — is enough to shield her from the town’s rejection, first for her hippie persona and then for her illegitimate child.
Willie has never known her father, although her mother’s explanation that it had to be one of three men is family lore. In San Francisco, Vi lived in a commune, “in what she liked to describe as ‘an experiment in free love’. . . She was only 17, she always said, sighing. What did she know about precautions?”
When Willie was born, “more than 10 1/2 long months after she came home — I was pig-headed even in the womb, she always said in explanation — she had pared my fathers down to three — she was fairly certain when she saw my pink skin that it wasn’t the black man.”
Now that Willie has returned to Templeton, about one semester shy of a Ph.D. based on research that would guarantee a career, Vi is not happy to see her years of work turn to dust. She tells her daughter that she’s welcome to stay, but that she must have a project. Maybe working at the Baseball Museum, or the Farmer’s Museum or even volunteering as a candy striper at the hospital.
And then, she shares a secret she’s carried all of Willie’s life: Willie’s father isn’t one of the men from the commune but a man from Templeton.
Willie is shocked and angry and asks her mother for more information. Her mother is loath to share but gives her daughter a single clue; her father is, like Willie and Vi, related to Marmaduke Temple, “Through some sort of liaison, at some point in the past.” It’s not much of a starting point, but it’s enough. Research, after all, is what Willie does. She’s found her project and embarks on it with a vengeance.
Willie’s is a first-person narrative, involving her reintroduction to her home and all it carries: the ghost in Averell Cottage, the death of the monster in Glimmerglass Lake, townspeople she hasn’t seen in years, her changed mother. The past is revealed as Willie discovers it, digging into the journals, letters, news stories and simmering rumors that are the town’s history, beginning with the arrival of Marmaduke Temple.
Journeying through the pastiche of past and present feels much like going though an extremely well-written and well-documented family scrapbook (and uncovering a few skeletons along the way). It’s a rich read, enhanced by pictures and photos, with skillfully interlaced elements of the fantastic, the hidden and the mundane.
“The Monsters of Templeton” is also, as the author admits in her note at the novel’s start, about her hometown of Cooperstown, N.Y. Remembering a time when she was far from home, she writes, “I missed my village the way I’d miss a person.”
As she did her research, which included reading as much James Fenimore Cooper as she could stomach, she found “the more I knew, the more the facts drifted from their moorings.”
And so, as Cooper did in “The Pioneers,” she wrote about Cooperstown and called it Templeton. She reimagines some of Cooper’s characters, including town founder Judge William Cooper, upon whom Fenimore Cooper based his Marmaduke Temple. Other Cooper characters, including Natty Bumppo and Chingachgook, are also central to Templeton’s history.
The result is riveting, fun and unpredictable. Groff casts an ambitious net, and it absolutely works. She’s juggling a huge cast and a complex family tree, but the reader comes to understand the implications, just as Willie does. And the elements do finally come together to a surprisingly satisfying end. Not too neat or pat, but like Baby Bear’s porridge, just right.
Robin Vidimos is a freelance writer who reviews books for The Denver Post and Buzz in the ‘Burbs.
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Fiction
The Monsters of Templeton, by Lauren Groff, $24.95
