I managed a glimpse of myself, and saw my features were dark and veiled. I knew then it was my good ghost, the indirect watcher over my life, that had for now slipped around me. I’d become the yolk in an egg; I’d become one human bone, my body at the marrow and the ghost surrounding it, tense as flesh. [p. 304]
On the day that Wilhelmina -- 'Willie' -- Upton returns to her hometown, Templeton, the corpse of a prehistoric beast floats to the surface of the lake. Willie is saddened by the death of this legendary creature, but she has other things on her mind. Firstly, she is pregnant by her academic supervisor, Dr Primus Dwyer, and secondly, her mother Vivienne has finally given her a hint about her father's identity. Vi had always claimed Willie was the result of some drug-stoked hippie orgy, but now she reveals that Willie's father is a Templeton man, someone who's distantly related to Vi through the tangled family tree of the Temples and Averells. Willie sets out to research the family history, and discovers some surprising connections: she also encounters friends and acquaintances from her childhood and teenage years, including the awkwardly-monickered Zeke Felcher. Meanwhile, her mother has turned to Christianity, and to the Reverend John Melkovitch, whom Willie refers to as Reverend Milky.
This is a beautifully-written novel, and one I wish I'd read in paper form: the historical chapters, revealing details of various Temple/Averell generations long gone, are punctuated by images of Willie's family tree, altered each time she learns something new. These, and the photographs and sketches of Willie's forebears, are not well-suited to Kindle reading.
But the prose is glorious in whatever format it's read. The family backstory is carefully layered, with echoes and old secrets aplenty: there are bastard children, wastrel sons, slavery and servitude, arson and blackmail, and an ancient curse. Some things recur through the generations: the monster in Lake Glimmerglass, the ghosts of Averell Cottage, and Aristabulus Mudge, the apothecary / herbalist who provides rat poison and contraception to Willie's ancestors and 'invigorating' herbs to Willie's father.
The Monsters of Templeton is, in a way, a work of literary fanfiction. Groff grew up in Cooperstown, hometown of novelist James Fennimore Cooper, and her Jacob Franklin Temple -- the town's most famous son, author of many novels including one that helps Willie and her friend Clarissa decode a cryptic comment in an old letter -- is surely a homage. She borrows some of Cooper's characters, too, to people the history of Templeton: Natty Bumpo, Cora Monro, Uncas ... But it's not an uncritical borrowing. Willie remarks on the shallowness of Temple's female characters: generations of Willie's female ancestors, revealed in letters and journals, have or seize agency, make the decisions that shape the family tree.
Groff's original characters shine. Willie's ancestors are vividly imagined, their loves and hates distinctive and yet building a story about Templeton and about the family. There are monsters male and female, in the documents Willie pores over and in the present day (the slimy Primus Dwyer made me grind my teeth: and also flinch, a bit, because I know his sort). If I've a criticism, it is that there is not enough about the creature in the lake: not until the very end of the novel, when it feels like a balm. I'd have welcomed its presence earlier in the story, and not merely as a half-glimpsed shape or a disturbance in the water.
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