rev. of The Monsters of Templeton by Lauren Groff

The Monsters of Templeton, a novel by Lauren Groff (Voice): What's fresh and fun about The Monsters of Templeton, by Lauren Groff, is how it doesn't fit neatly into one contemporary genre. It's literary, it's historical, and it's peppered with mysteries, ghosts, and "monsters." Even the packaging of the book is a delight—full of illustrations, family trees, and maps.

Graduate student Willie Upton returns home pregnant and disgraced by scandal on the same day that a dead, Loch Ness-style monster surfaces from the town's vast lake. Her hippie-turned-born-again mother, descended from Templeton's founding families, is newly compelled to finally tell Willie the truth: that Willie was not conceived during a San Francisco love-in, but is in fact the child of a fellow Templetonian. She refuses to say just who the man is, however, leaving archeologist Willie to research her way through two hundred years of town and family secrets.

Groff, like her digger protagonist, is interested in exploring what lies below surfaces, and she has no trouble dropping metaphor firmly into the story from the first sentence: the monster surfacing in the lake named Glimmerglass. Birth. Death. Her deft handling of multiple voices results in chapters that weave back and forth through time. Old letters, diary entries, even a portion of an eighteenth-century book appears, and what we learn about the past not only changes our take on it, it causes us to reflect on just what the past is, anyway. And yes, she flirts with the supernatural, but in a very Jamesian way—every incident of the uncanny in this story could also be argued as being psychological in origin.

Groff based Templeton and some of its inhabitants partly on her beloved hometown, Cooperstown, New York, and partly on the literary Templeton created by Cooperstown's own James Fenimore Cooper. Myths and characters she grew up with elbowed their way into the book she wanted to write, she says, as a "love story for Cooperstown."

The result is an accomplished debut, detailing a well-drawn world that a reader has no trouble settling into and believing in. Filtering through it is a yearning for the mysteries of childhood and at the same time, a desire for those mysteries not to be completely revealed. When Groff's prose is at its most lyrical, past and present fuse beautifully. An elderly doctor, in a boat, rowing around the dead lake creature, begins to weep:

In his mouth there was the sweet burn of horehound candy, the exact savor of his long-ago childhood.

And one night Willie stays up for hours reading letters dating from the Civil War:

By the time I looked up, dazed, from the letters, and out the window into the dark and sleeping town, I saw another change. I felt as if I were rising out of my body, then through the roof, and when I looked down, there was a different Templeton, busy even in the earliest parts of the dawn. I could hear the sleeping regiments in the fields out by the river, the night watch's boots on the frozen ground.

In her author's note, Groff quotes James Fenimore Cooper: "An interesting fiction...addresses our love of truth." The Monsters of Templeton is an interesting fiction indeed. —Maryanne O'Hara

Maryanne O'Hara is Associate Fiction Editor of Ploughshares.