The Monsters of Templeton, Where Skeletons Aren’t The Only Things in the Closet

By Breanne Boland March 6, 2008 Issue

In The Monsters of Templeton, Lauren Groff combines multiple viewpoints, veiled and twisted history, and archival materials to illuminate her story of a 28-year-old doctoral candidate who flees to her mother’s house in the wake of a serious professional and personal misstep.

Willie Upton has an affair with her grad school professor while on a prestigious archeological dig in Alaska. Between excavations, she becomes pregnant. Before she can break the news to the professor, his wife appears on the scene and Willie runs home to Templeton, a village in upstate New York. Templeton is a fictionalized version of Cooperstown, New York, a town that spawned authors such as James Fenimore Cooper and Groff herself.

Groff explains in a preface that she started the book when she was homesick for Cooperstown; in her longing, she concocted a story that blends renamed historical figures, characters from Cooper’s work, and her own creations.

Willie shows up at her childhood home to find that Vivienne, her hippie mother, has found religion. As if Willie needed further momentum for her tailspin, Vi then reveals that Willie’s father is not one of several inhabitants of a commune in 1970s San Francisco, as she has long said; instead, it’s someone in this very town. She refuses to reveal who it is and instead gives only a cryptic hint: Willie’s father is someone who, like the two of them, is also spawned from Marmaduke Temple, the town’s founder.

A researcher by trade, Willie dives into the archives of the New York State Historical Association, which is virtually a scrapbook of her family history. As she searches for an unrecognized, illegitimate ancestor who could have been responsible for her mysterious father, we dive into the archives with her. Accounts from housekeepers, nameless Native American girls, famous novelists, and Natty Bumppo himself bring Willie closer to finding her unknown parent.

Meanwhile, she begins exploring the more recent past. She left Templeton after high school and went on to have an illustrious academic career on the west coast — up until the scandal with her professor, anyway. While she finds little-explored truths about her ancestors, she reunites with some of her acquaintances from high school, as all of her actual friends have long since left their tiny hometown.

While playing hard and fast with history and classic literature, Groff also introduces an element of the supernatural. She uses a masterfully deft touch to make phenomena like ghosts and undersea creatures almost commonplace and even logical. Willie grew up in a cottage that had seen some of the town’s most notorious happenings; of course there’s a ghost in her childhood bedroom. And rather than being a strange, incongruous addition, the creature that floats dead from the depths of Lake Glimmerglass comes to represent the current of life in the town, what exists there outside of what the town’s many museums document.

This is Groff’s first novel, and such a goulash of history and fiction could have been an unwieldy mess in lesser hands. Instead, her chorus of narrators comes together nicely as Willie searches for the truth, finding more than she imagined. While she dives into her research, she comes to realize that her current predicament isn’t necessarily all that bad, or even unprecedented. Her ancestors and the past residents of her town found themselves in situations just as troublesome, and just as entertaining. Willie’s hard times and quick mind find their match in her family tree, which she expands and refines throughout the book as further layers are revealed.

This is a book that’s best enjoyed by the patient reader who is willing to let Groff unravel her tale without leaping to the back spoil the end. Instead, Willie’s summer at home comes to a natural, satisfying conclusion, closing her tale with a grace and wisdom that comes from those who understand how the past, present, and future flow together, and how nothing is ever as big — or as small — as we think it is at the time.

The Monsters of Templeton, 384 pages, Hyperion. Available at bookstores, libraries, and online booksellers.

(Top)

More from Breanne Boland

More Book Reviews