The Monsters of Templeton
Lauren Groff, 2008
Hyperion
384 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781401340926
Summary
One dark summer dawn, at the exact moment that an enormous monster dies in Lake Glimmerglass, twenty-eight-year-old Willie (nee Wilhemina) Upton returns to her hometown of Templeton, NY in disgrace.
She expects to be able to hide in the place that has been home to her family for generations, but Willie then learns that the story her mom, Vi, had always told her about her father has all been a lie. He wasn't the one-night stand Vi had led her to imagine, but someone else entirely. Someone from this very town.
As Willie digs for the truth about her lineage, voices from the town's past—both sinister and disturbing—rise up around her to tell their sides of the story. In the end, dark secrets come to light, past and present blur, old mysteries are finally put to rest, and the surprising truth about more than one monster is revealed. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—July 23, 1978
• Where—Cooperstown, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., Amherst College; M.F.A., University of Wisconsin-Madison
• Awards—Pushcart Prize
• Currently—lives in Gainesville, Florida
Lauren Groff is an American novelist and short story writer, who was as born and raised in Cooperstown, New York. She graduated from Amherst College and from the University of Wisconsin–Madison with an MFA in fiction.
Novels
Groff is the author of three novels. Her first novel, The Monsters of Templeton (2008), is a contemporary tale about coming home to Templeton, a stand-in for Cooperstown, New York. Interspersed in the book are voices from characters drawn from the town's history, as well as from James from Fenimore Cooper's 1823 The Pioneers, the first book in the Leatherstocking Tales. Fenimore Cooper set his book in a fictionalized Cooperstown which he, too, called Templeton. Groff's debut landed on the New York Times Bestseller list and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for New Writers.
Groff's second novel, Arcadia (2012), recounts the story of the first child born in a fictional 1960s commune in upstate New York. It, too, became a New York Times Bestseller and received solid reviews and was also named as one of the Best Books of 2012 by the New York Times, Washington Post, Kirkus Reviews, NPR, Vogue, Toronto Globe and Mail, and Christian Science Monitor.
Fates and Furies (2015), Groff's third novel, examines a complicated marriage over the course of 24 years aas told by first the husband, then his wife. Like her previous novels, it, too, was published to wide acclaim, some calling it "brilliant," with Ron Charles of the Washington Post saying that "Lauren Groff just keeps getting better and better."
Stories
Groff has had short stories published in the New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Five Points, and Ploughshares, as well as the anthologies Best New American Voices 2008, Pushcart Prize XXXII, and Best American Short Stories—the 2007, 2010 and 2014 editions. Many of her stories appear in her collection Delicate Edible Birds (2009).
Personal
Groff is married with two children and currently lives in Gainesville, Florida. Groff's sister is the Olympic Triathlete Sarah True. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 9/22/2015.)
Book Reviews
The Monsters of Templeton, a fascinating first novel by Lauren Groff, is a book with joy in its marrow-fabulous.
San Francisco Chronicle
Lauren Groff hits a home run in her first at-bat, with a novel that is intriguingly constructed and compulsively readable.
Denver Post
At the start of Groff's lyrical debut, 28-year-old Wilhelmina Willie Upton returns to her picturesque hometown of Templeton, N.Y., after a disastrous affair with her graduate school professor during an archeological dig in Alaska. In Templeton, Willie's shocked to find that her once-bohemian mother, Vi, has found religion. Vi also reveals to Willie that her father wasn't a nameless hippie from Vi's commune days, but a man living in Templeton. With only the scantiest of clues from Vi, Willie is determined to untangle the roots of the town's greatest families and discover her father's identity. Brilliantly incorporating accounts from generations of Templetonians—as well as characters borrowed from the works of James Fenimore Cooper, who named an upstate New York town Templeton in The Pioneers—Groff paints a rich picture of Willie's current predicaments and those of her ancestors. Readers will delight in Willie's sharp wit and Groff's creation of an entire world, complete with a lake monster and illegitimate children.
Publishers Weekly
Twenty-eight-year-old Willie Upton has just detonated a promising academic career by her scandalous affair with a married professor. Now pregnant, she slinks home to Templeton, NY, just as an enormous dead monster is pulled from nearby Lake Glimmerglass. There, Willie's mother, a former hippie, admits she has always lied about Willie's paternity and discloses this one clue about her biological father's actual identity: he is a descendant of Judge Marmaduke Temple and currently a prominent member of Templeton. Sound familiar? Pay attention: James Fenimore Cooper is from Cooperstown, NY (as is Groff) and used it as the model for Templeton, NY, setting of The Pioneers. Yes, Groff has daringly used Cooper's Templeton and its inhabitants as the launching pad for Willie's search for her father. Willie takes her mother's clue and pulls on it, following endless strands to get her answer, all the while tormented with indecision about her own pregnancy. Liberally peppered with old photographs, diary entries, letters, and a family tree constantly in need of revision as Willie eliminates one possibility after another spanning more than two centuries of shocking Templeton history, this is an irresistible adventure. Highly recommended.
Beth E. Andersen - Library Journal
Cooperstown, N.Y., and its most famous native son provide first-time novelist Groff with much of the grist for this sprawling tale of a young woman searching for her father. In The Pioneers, James Fenimore Cooper rechristened his (and Groff's) hometown as Templeton; she not only adopts the name, but grafts her protagonist onto the family tree of a character from the novel, Judge Marmaduke Temple. Grad student Willie Upton slinks back into Templeton in the summer of 2002 just as the corpse of a mysterious, 50-foot creature surfaces in Lake Glimmerglass. She's had a disastrous affair with a married professor and isn't sure she can go back to Stanford, Willie tells her feisty single mother. Vi, who always claimed not to know which member of her San Francisco commune knocked her up in 1973, has a surprise of her own. In truth, Willie's father lives in Templeton and doesn't even know he has a daughter. Vi won't tell Willie his name, but (implausibly) drops a big hint. Like Vi, Willie's dad is descended from Judge Temple, who apparently scattered illegitimate children across the 18th-century landscape. As Willie hunts through old documents for clues to her parentage, the voices of generations of Templeton residents mingle with those of such archetypal Cooper creations as Natty Bumppo and Chingachgook in a narrative that winds through 250 years of American history. The secrets uncovered include murder, arson, poisonous intra-family rivalries and the exploitation of slaves and Native Americans. The leviathan pulled out of the lake seems less of a monster than some of Templeton's respectable founders. Willie and other contemporary citizens are far nicer; readers will be pleased when the likable heroine meets her father, reconciles with Vi and forms a tentative new relationship with a decent guy. But there seem to be two novels here, and they don't fit together terribly well. Flawed, but commendably ambitious and stuffed with ideas-many of them not well developed, but inspiring hope for a more disciplined second effort from this talented newcomer.
Kirkus Reviews
Book Club Discussion Questions
1. What did you think of the range of voices and time periods the author employs in The Monsters of Templeton? How would the novel have been different had the story been told from a single point of view, or been set in one era?
2. “As soon as it died, our lives spiraled down,” the Buds lament in Chapter 13, on the death of the Lake Glimmerglass monster (page 151). Why are so many people in Templeton affected by the monster’s death? What did the monster represent to them?
3. Given her conflicted relationship with her mother and, to a lesser extent, with her hometown, why do you think Willie Upton decides to go back to Templeton? What was Willie looking for when she returned to Templeton? Does she find it?
4. In what instances do ghosts make appearances in The Monsters of Templeton? What do the ghosts represent? What other symbols does the author employ in the novel? What do they mean?
5. In the Author’s Note, the author discusses writing about her hometown of Cooperstown, New York, and calling the fictional town Templeton. Do you think that The Monsters of Templeton could have taken place in any other locale? Why is the actual town’s history so important to the book’s present day events? How would the book have changed if she had decided to call the town Cooperstown?
6. For twenty-eight years, Vivienne has told her daughter that Willie was the product of a hippie commune. The day that Willie returns home, she decides to tell her the truth: that her father was a man in Templeton. What would you have done if you were in Willie’s position? Or in Vivienne’s?
7. Of the many characters from the past—Marmaduke Temple, Davey Shipman, Charlotte and Cinnamon, Elizabeth Franklin Temple, to name a few—which one(s) stood out for you? Why?
8. Vivienne’s life is seemingly full of contradictions: she’s a former drug-using hippie with a child out of wedlock who later converts to Christianity and becomes the chaste girlfriend of a minister. Talk about these and other aspects of Vivienne’s character. How are she and Willie different, and similar?
9. What did you think of Willie’s search to uncover her father’s identity? What did each new layer of history teach Willie about her family? Why was it important that Willie learn everything she learned?
10. What was your opinion of Ezekiel Felcher at the beginning of the novel? Did it change as the novel progressed? Did you think that Willie might stay in Templeton to be with him? What do you think she should have done? What do you think she will do in the future?
11. “This is a story of creation,” says Marmaduke Temple in one of the epigrams before the book begins, ostensibly an excerpt from his own storyabout how he founded Templeton. In what other ways is The Monsters of Templeton a story of creation? How can Willie’s story been seen as a story of creation?
12. The Monsters of Templeton ends with a death and a birth. What does this mean in the larger context of the novel? Who—or what—else is born in the book?
13. What does the book’s title mean? Who or what are the “monsters” it refers to? What, exactly, does the word “monster” mean in the context of this book?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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