The Monsters of Templeton

Lauren Groff's The Monsters of Templeton (2008) takes us to a fictionalized version of Cooperstown, courtesy to the screwed-up life of our first-person narrator, Willie.  Willie, working on a doctorate at Stanford, scampers back home after her romance with an archaeology professor, Primus Dwyer, goes badly while they're on a dig in Alaska; worried about being arrested for attempted murder, among other things (you had to be there), she tries to cocoon herself with her mother Vivienne, an ex-hippie-turned-nurse.  Meanwhile, Willie's friend Clarissa is suffering from lupus (and Clarissa's boyfriend is suffering from Clarissa).  A Nessieish monster (albeit a rather fuzzy one) turns up dead in the lake. And then, matters manage to get even worse: Willie discovers that Vivienne's narrative of her illegitimate birth, courtesy of her wild nights as a hippie, is...hogwash.  Hence the novel's main narrative, in which Willie puts her Stanford graduate education to good use by searching for her real father.

As Willie's quest for her true paternity suggests, myths of origin--personal, fictional, national--drive the narrative.  Jacob Franklin Temple, the novel's stand-in for James Fenimore Cooper, becomes the first truly popular novelist of the fledgling United States, but part of his authorial project involves "rid[ding] himself of alternate versions of our father" (267), sanitizing the paterfamilias in order to secure a fantasy of the family's colonial heroism.  Jacob's father Marmaduke, the founder of Templeton (and based on Marmaduke Temple from Cooper's The Pioneers), not only visits houses of ill repute, but also (with far more serious repercussions) manages to salt the local earth with illegitimate children.  Marmaduke's philandering, which inadvertently results in at least two deaths, reveals larger abuses of power at the heart of the country's origins--the exploitation of African-Americans, Native Americans, and women, all of whom manage to strike back in some way or another by the time the novel is finished.  (Given Willie's gripes about Jacob's fictional treatment of women, one suspects a whack at Cooper here.)  Twenty-first century Templeton, meanwhile, survives by turning itself into a giant tourist trap, a fantasy of Americana frozen in time.  Like Willie's home, Averell Cottage, "with its original cottage from 1793, one wing from Victorian 1890, and another from the tasteless 1970s" (2),  Templeton's apparent atemporality is a trifle jury-rigged.

The narrative unfolds as a series of first-person narratives, ranging from Willie and the group voice of the "Running Buds" (a running group of middle-aged men) to the long-lost voices of Willie's relatives.  The voices turn out to be doubly fictional, since more of Temple's/Cooper's characters, like Davey Shipman (Natty Bumppo) and Sagamore (Chingachgook), turn up in the course of Willie's researches.   Some of the characters speak in monologues; others speak through testaments, diaries, letters, and novels.  Perhaps wisely, Groff restrains herself when it comes to pastiching late-eighteenth and nineteenth-century dialogue.  In addition, there are numerous photographs and drawings of the major players.  We thus have an archive that reverses the effects of Jacob's historical erasures, although the unreliable nature of some of the monologues, not to mention the internal contradictions, do produce some distance between the modern reader and the vanished past.   

In other words, the novel looks very much like Joseph O'Connor's Redemption Falls (2007), which I discussed just a few weeks ago.  But unlike Redemption Falls, which offers a deeply uneasy account of historical reconstruction, The Monsters of Templeton adheres very closely to Suzanne Keen's model of the "romance of the archive," which usually affirms the possibility of identifying the truth about the past.  The narrative unfolds along the lines of, say, Cold Case or CSI, with all the necessary evidence available either in textual form or in convenient oral form; even dead ends wind up generating some sort of useful information, if only by filling in gaps in Willie's family tree (which we see in greater and greater detail as the story progresses).  Moreover, despite its potentially traumatic revelations about the Temples and Templeton's past, The Monsters of Templeton insists on being optimistic (in good American fashion?): even though the conclusion isn't entirely a fairy-tale wrap-up, the novel ends with all major problems either solved or in the process of being solved, all major crises averted, and most family ruptures reasonably healed.   As newspaper reviewer Yvonne Zipp rightly points out, "The historical puzzle satisfies to the end, but in the present day, Groff tries a little too hard to smooth out Willie's future." Old Templeton may have relegated gender-bending Ginger Averell to the outer reaches, but modern Templeton can reconcile itself to a lesbian daughter and her partner.  Most things, the novel suggests, appear to have been fixed.  Even the situation with the monster turns out to be not quite what  it seemed...

As a result, the novel does feel, for lack of a better word, packaged.  It has elements of the absurd and grotesque; it throws in some magic realism (the monster, the woman who sets fires with her mind--which is perhaps too close to Pleasantville for comfort); it dabbles in metafiction.   But while the end result is entertaining, I couldn't help wishing that it had pushed its conceits further.  For example: the ambiguous nature of Temple's/Cooper's fictional characters--Marmaduke Temple, Natty Bumppo, etc.--who here contribute to Willie's ancestry and thus make her not "just" a fictional character, but actually the descendant of iconic American fictions.  Willie, in a sense, is born from the foundations of American historical fiction.  And yet, this point never moves much beyond being a literary conceit.  So much more could have been done here, I think.