Customer Reviews

Monsters Of Templeton

5 star:		(45)
4 star:		(31)
3 star:		(24)
2 star:		(13)
1 star:		(10)

 

 

The Monsters of Templeton is written by a woman who grew up in Cooperstown, NY, in which this novel is set. Willie Upton, descendant of the fictional counterpart of James Fenimore Cooper, comes flying home at the age of 28, rebounding from a disastrous affair with her doctoral advisor in the fear that she is pregnant. She has also tried to murder the wife of her paramour. Once she arrives home in NY, Willie embarks on a series of genealogical quests.
There is a real monster in Templeton, who dies the day Willie arrives at her mother's house. But the danger in reading The Monsters of Templeton lies in interpreting things too literally. At heart, this is a coming of age story involving a heroine a bit older than most in the coming of age genre. Willie has had an unorthodox upbringing in a town that, immediately below its surface, is as unorthodox as they come. Its founding, its founder, its history, its long-term inhabitants, and its current persona are all unusual, to say the least. Some have characterized Willie as immature. I view her as a young woman caught between two worlds, two times, who is trying to find her self and her destiny, both within her family history and outside of it. And, by returning to her formerly despised hometown, and by allowing Templeton to be itself, and by utilizing her own formidable education to delve into her own ancestry regardless of what it might reveal, Willie does manage to set herself on the right path. She comes to terms with her past, her present, and, as much as possible, with her future. If that isn't magical, I don't know what is. Congratulations to author Groff for producing a strong piece of literature her first time out.

I think I was originally expecting something different from a book called, 'The Monsters of Templeton" that was hugely endorsed by the maestro of literary horror Stephen King. And yes in the book's opening passage an enormous sea creature washes up lakeside, and there's some pulsing ghost like entity that lives in the childhood home of our returning protagonist. However, beyond that this is simply a book about a woman discovering the secret of her lineage through the letters and correspondence of her multitude of ancestors, some of whom are monstrous indeed. Three quarters of the way through I found myself caring less about if Willie would figure out the mystery of who her father was, and instead was more smitten with Groff's romance with the town of Templeton which is directly copied from Upstate New York's Coopertown, where the author grew up. It's all small town USA, Stars Hollowesque with a Greek Chorus of joggers who pass the year with their own few chapters to mark their individual lives throughout the seasons. I don't know if one could call the book completely successful if I'm not caring about the main plot of the story, yet at the same time, I did find myself looking Cooperstown up on the internet, and checking out the various Bed and Breakfasts in the area and wondering about a trip.

Wow, how do I describe this book? The Monsters of Templeton, by Lauren Groff, is a fiction/fantasy/mystery/ghost story unlike anything I've read in quite a long time, and it is close to being brilliant.
Set in the fictional town of Templeton, NY (fashioned after Cooperstown), Willie Upton has come home to deal with being pregnant by a professor at Stanford, where she was attending college. Believing herself to be the product of her mother's counter-culture ways in 1970's San Francisco, she is stunned to find out that her father might actually live in Templeton. This is the story of Willie's search for her father, and her wacky genealogical discoveries along the way. Groff even includes "photos" of Willie's ancestors!
Some of the other subjects in this book are Alaska, Archaeology, Arson, Baseball, Clergy, Community Life, Dreams, Friendship, Ghosts, Lakes, Libraries, Murder, Museums, Native Americans, Orphans, Prostitutes, Reading, Runners, Sea Monsters, Summer, Swimming, Toys, Trees, Virtues, Wealth, Widows/Widowers, and Writers. Isn't that enough to make you read it?
I didn't find any deep meaning to this story, but it was a joy to go along for the ride, with all of its crazy twists and turns.
I liked not being able to predict the ending. The Monsters of Templeton is a really entertaining book!

As explained at the beginning of this book, Templeton is actually Cooperstown. You know, the place with the National Baseball Hall of Fame.

Or rather, it's a "slantwise" version of Cooperstown, with lake monsters, friendly ghosts, and a tangle of ancient family secrets. Lauren Groff's "The Monsters of Templeton" is a cleverly interwoven mystery of old secrets, poetic writing and forgotten scandals, but her heroine is the book's Achilles heel.

Willie Upton is returning to her mother's shabby mansion, pregnant and disgraced after trying to run over her married lover's wife. On the same morning, a gigantic monster is found floating in the nearby lake.

Unsurprisingly, Willie is far more interested in her own problems, especially when her hippie-turned-Baptist mother reveals that Willie was not conceived in a free-love orgy, but with a man she knows right in Templeton. To distract herself from her woes, Willie decides to take a single clue and explore back through her family's history, hoping to find the man who fathered her.

Turns out the Temple family tree has a lot of memorable people -- a savvy slave girl, an ethereal Schizophrenic, a pyromaniac, at least one murderer, a popular novelist, a gentle giant. And as Willie backtracks through her family tree, she finds that the secret of her father's ancestry is intertwined in family scandals long forgotten...

It sounds like a fairly ordinary "family saga" novel, doesn't it? But Groff does infuse something special into the story, including touches of magical realism (an immortal town weirdo, a long-lived lake monster, and a lilac ghost) and a series of family accounts that intertwine over time. Which ones are true, and which are self-serving lies? Well, that's up to the reader.

And Groff spins out this complex story in the decaying small-town paradise of Templeton, through misty colours and vibrant details ("the letters themselves smelled of antique rose-water and age-crisped lace"). Despite its links to the "slantwise" past, a feeling of near-fantastical isolation fills Groff's prose, tempered by the fact that there are so many quirky moments from Clarissa and Vi ("I LIKE the international foods potluck").

The biggest problem with this book is Willie herself -- a whiny, selfish brat whose snobbery, anti-religious bigotry and violent behavior are treated as minor flaws. About two-thirds of the way through, Groff seems to realize that Willie is a pretty nasty piece of work, and tries to soften her into a more likable heroine. This happens without warning or development, and it's too little too late.

Groff's supporting characters are far more likable, especially Willie's vivacious, sickly pal Clarissa, and the two unpredictable ex-classmates who are inexplicably vying for her affections. And Vi is a character deserving her own book -- an ex-hippie earth-mother-type whose free-spirited past is awkwardly fitting with her newfound faith. As the book winds on, we find that it's Vi, not Willie, who is the center of the book.

The only real flaw with "The Monsters of Templeton" is Lauren Groff's lead character. The rest of the book is a dreamlike tapestry of half-real history and magical realism. Definitely worth a read for Groff's way with words.

Few writers can truly pull off what Groff tries to do here, and Groff does not succeed. The story is told using multiple narrative voices, letters, newspaper articles and diaries. But that only works if the voices all ring true, and here the voices all sound the same (and often the "old" ones sound clangingly modern). Ghosts, monsters and the occasional undying local are dragged in for a stab at magical realism. But here it's just tiring. I felt like I was reading the literary equivalent of a sewing sampler, with the smartest person in writing class showing that she can make use of every trick and technique. IMHO, a talented writer who needs to calm down and mature.

I was drawn to this book because I have been researching my own ancestors over the last few years. Ms Groff uses many voices to relate the story of her family and hometown, all sound authentic. As a woman who never left her own hometown and who's been reading her grandmother's diaries for 2 years, I can understand the author's choice to set her book in her hometown and then peel away the layers.

I generally stay away from books written in the first person, but I really liked the young narrator and I was anxious to hear her voice. The other modern female characters: mother and best friend are engaging.

Yes, there are elements of the paranormal in the plot but it is the "monsters" among us who we should fear.

The prose is wonderful. No question about that and hence the 3 stars. I was really enjoying the book until, like some other reviewers, I got about 1/3 of the way through. Even though the prose continued to be wonderful, I was just not interested enough to continue. I did find the central character somewhat unsympathetic (annoying really), but the main problem for me was that in order to hold your interest you have to care about who her father is... and I suddenly realized I didn't. Once you lose interest in the identity of the person who is the focus of her search, even the prose can't keep you invested in the story.

Sorry, very well written but ultimately just not enough to hold my interest. So many books... too little time.

Quoting from Templeton, P147:
Even still, we run. We have not reached our average of 57.92 years without knowing that you run through it, and it hurts and you run through it some more, and if it hurts worse, you run through it even more, and when you finish, you will have broken through. In the end, when you are done, and stretching, your heartbeat slows, and your sweat dries, if you've run through the hard part, you will remember no pain. ~

Good stuff.

As a summation of Monsters of Templeton, since I finished it this morning, I have to say that I either did not give it the sort of attention it required of me, or that it's more enigmatic than the reviews state. Aside from these tidbits in the prose (like the one above), I did not much enjoy Templeton. The reading-journals-and-correspondence-and-flashback reminded me too unfortunately of Byatt's Possession. The protagonist, who comes into the novel as "Willie" and who I saw at first as just a dumb bit of intentional gender trickery by Groff (or, worse, my predisposition to expect protagonists to be male), becomes a kind of cliché, and far more pathetic and whiny, self-destructive and self-important than I remember, for instance, Gilbert in Eat, Pray, Love ever getting. The idea that she'd physiologically crafted a faux-pregnancy (with stress and desire, or something like that) is bizarre, sure, but her inability to get over the professor was really just pathetic for a smart protagonist. But maybe that's the clincher--Willie is not smart. She's terribly typical. Matter of fact, now that I'm thinking of it, she interacts with the world in the same exaggerated and dramatic way that one of my close friends does. Not necessarily bad, of course, just maybe not the inner-monologue you want to follow around for a couple weeks of free time and some 360 pages.

But one of the worst detractors for me, to be sure, was the genealogy. Running through ancestry, and including revised family trees every couple chapters, just isn't interesting. Especially (stamping fist) when Willie's mom (Vi) could have saved the reader something like half the book, since she knew the key to the genealogical question all along. The most intriguing characters are largely unresolved at the conclusion of the book (save the epilogue, and Screw epilogues!). Clarissa, Willie's truly dynamic friend, is dying of internal malady, and in many regards, I would have rather heard this story from her perspective. As it is, I am sad that we get so little of her and are burdened with so much from all these other idiotic and egocentric characters. But right next to Clarissa is Glimmney, the lake monster. The book was toted at being fantastic (and I mean in the "synonym to bizarre" not the "synonym to good" way), and while there's a lake monster, ghosts in houses and lakes, and baseball tourists (!), the lake monster (et al) is simply a freakish and wholly tangential part of an otherwise mundane story of family dysfunction family and human error. I concede, again, that I probably missed some great underlying concept (one Stephen King, Lauren Belfer, and Lorrie Moore apparently found) that makes Glimmney relevant, which explains Templeton's outpouring of sorrow at its death (but subsequent disinterest after it's carted out of town on a flatbed). And the ghosts solving mysteries for the oft-dopey Willie by surrounding and taking control of her, well, um, that struck me as less wowing and surreal than simply the author moving the plotline through a convenience (otherwise, how else would Willie have found the fragile, hidden, and climax-inducing correspondence?). Alas, I think this is one of the few times (and the first stated) where I would probably rather have just seen the hour-and-a-half movie adaptation. I bet I would revel in the plot being edited and made more direct and succinct, the fact that the professor might have been demonized more easily, that the genealogy would have been clipped into something coherent, and a host of other things. CG, I don't know. Alas, let's just finish by saying that I do not plan on recommending or passing this book on to friends...

It's hard to believe that this is a debut novel, given its excellent execution and the way it showcases the author's considerable literary talents.

The plot premise is that our central character, Willie (female), has just returned home to small town New York after a disasterous (and then some) affair with the professor directing her archaeology dig. In short order, she reveals that she believes that she is pregnant, her born-again mother retaliates by saying that Willie's father is not the random nameless hippie that she always believed him to be but, in fact someone in this very town, and a giant monster turns up dead in the lake. And that's just the first pages, mind you.

As part of the quest for her father, Willie sets off on a genealogical hunt, dusting off and cross-examining whatever remains of her idiosyncratic ancestors. Groff creates different voices beautifully: we get to hear the voices of the people speak for themselves; we read their letters; we sample their novels; we peek into their journals. We also hear the voices of some of James Fenimore Cooper's characters, plus the voices of some of the residents of Willie's hometown. Groff calls up these voices, and each stands out. I never found myself wondering, 100 pages later, which ancestor made what statement, which would be a problem on might expect in a novel like this.

The cast is simply too eclectic to describe (so give the book a try and read them for yourself!). Once again, let me stress that Groff keeps her Dickensian cast of characters straight, whether they live in the past or present. What they have in common is that they're all colorful, enjoyable, flawed people, true to "life" as we know it. Perhaps, though, the kindest, most sensitive of all is the lake monster, who we hear from only later (I won't say when) in the novel.

Willie's search into her own past is a fascinating detective story for all of us, and it raises questions about what the past means. Groff will not philosophize at you; rather, she uses her ongoing storylines to compell the reader to think about whether the past is a solid chunk of "history" or many little details, how we know when we know enough, how the past feeds in to who we are, how it imprints who we are, etc etc.

Highly recommended.

I've got to disagree with the recent spate of naysayers here. I loved THE MONSTERS OF TEMPLETON. I usually read about a book a week, but I took an extra week to savor this one. Lauren Groff baits and hooks her readers with an arresting opener: "The day I returned to Templeton steeped in disgrace, the fifty-foot corpse of a monster surfaced in Lake Glimmerglass." And then she never lets up.

Wilhelmina "Sunshine" Upton returns to her hometown of Templeton, NY (a fictionalized Cooperstown) seeking refuge and solace following an unfortunate affair with her Stanford archeology professor. Willie, pregnant, has also tried to run over the professor's wife, the Dean of Students, with a bush plane. Shortly after arriving in Templeton, Willie learns from her born-again mother, Vi, that her father is not an anonymous trick from Vi's commune days in San Francisco, but rather a prominent citizen of Templeton. The only clue to her father's identity that Vi offers Willie is that Willie is descended from Templeton's founder, Marmaduke Temple, both maternally and paternally. Willie taps her research skills to unravel the mystery of her parentage.

That's the set-up. Through letters, newspaper articles, journal entries, etc. Willie traces her family tree backwards through seven generations to the founding of Templeton. In addition to present and past citizens of Templeton, the aforementioned monster, a ghost, baseball, and characters borrowed from James Fenimore Cooper's oeuvre also figure here.

This is a dense, intricately plotted but never confusing narrative. Clever illustrations, including a constantly revised family tree, help greatly in this regard. There is inevitability to the solution of Willie's parentage that comes from Groff's careful plotting. (There's even a clue in the dust jacket illustration.)

The writing is lyrical, highly detailed, and yet accessible. Groff successfully crafts a host of distinctive narrative voices and paints vivid portraits of her town and its people. There are several subplots, most of which work quite well. The one exception would be that involving Willie's best friend, Clarissa, and her struggle with lupus. Even here, Clarissa is a well drawn, engaging character, but her story detracted from, rather than enhanced, the main storyline. Still, all in all, from beginning to end, this first novel is an admirable and bewitching work.