Yes You Can Go Home Again

The Monsters of Templeton by Lauren Groff.  Penguin Books. 460 pp.  ****

The Monsters of Templeton is Lauren Groff’s tribute to her hometown, Cooperstown, New York.  Apparently it was founded by the father of James Fenimore Cooper, it’s most famous citizen (but not, at this point, its finest novelist; Groff has far surpassed him), and includes statues and tributes to his various stories and beloved characters (whom I barely know.  I read one of Cooper’s novels, when my American literature professor held a gun to my head.  I remember virtually nothing).  This is a jam-packed entertaining novel with which a debut novelist wanted to make a splash, and she did; the book became a bestseller and was praised by no less an eminence than Stephen King, who said, “I was sorry to see this rich and wonderful novel come to an end.”

Groff is a talented literary writer who made sure in her first novel not to ignore the commercial side of things; she even includes a water monster, as if to capture the horror crowd.[1]  She showed that capability also in later books like Fates and Furies and Arcadia, both of which have high entertainment value.  In more recent books, like Matrix and The Vaster Wilds, she seems more sure of herself, with less catering to the reader and more focus on specific themes.  She is settling into the role of eminent novelist.  She’s extremely gifted.

The plot of this book, in a way, is simple.  Wilhelmina Upton is a native daughter of Templeton who has gone off in the world and made good.  She is a grad student at Stanford on the verge of earning her PhD.  She is everything her mother would have wanted her to be; Vi (as her daughter calls her) was a wild hippie who had also gone west as a young woman and admitted to her daughter that her father could have been any one of three men she had been consorting with in a drug-hazed period of her life.  She wanted better from her daughter, and she got it, except that—this is the temptation for the academic all-star—Willie has gotten together with her professor and recently discovered she is pregnant.  Even worse, the man’s wife has discovered their dalliance and confronted her, in a scene in which Willie tried to run over the woman with an airplane (it’s a long story).

Suddenly she is a disgraced young woman, coming back to Templeton with her tail (so to speak) between her legs, and her mother, much to Willie’s surprise, has become a born-again Christian, complete with a heavy metal cross that she wears everywhere.  Talk about role reversal.  Now she is the moralistic one, telling Willie she needs to get her life together, that she didn’t raise her daughter to act like this!  Like a common harlot!

Oh, and one more thing.  Vi has lied about Willie’s father all these years.  It wasn’t one of the guys in the California commune.  It was somebody right there in Templeton.  But she isn’t going to tell her.  Willie, with her skills as an academic researcher, will have to find out for herself.  The one hint she will offer is that Willie is descended on both sides from the famous progenitor of the town, Marmaduke Temple, father of the novelist.  So in searching for her father, Willie goes through the entire history of the town and studies a number of its current citizens.  She also runs into some old friends, potential love interests (at least they’d like to be).  There is also a group of six older men who run together every morning, who have known Willie all her life, and who are going through the kinds of things men of that age often face (marriages that end for various reasons, children who don’t turn out well, wives who have died).  Willie has all kinds of access to the past and present of the town, including an old-lady librarian who, though on her last legs—quite literally—seems to know plenty.

Readers of her later fiction will know that Groff has a bit of an obsession with Sixties hippies (she wrote a whole novel about them); she also has a thing about religion (which seems to hover at the edges of all her work, and shows up more centrally in her recent work) and loves to write about sex; Willie and Vi barely scratch the surface of what will happen in later books.

Who knows what I would have thought if I had approached these books in chronological order.  I do think this is a marvelously accomplished first novel.  There are places (as when Willie is in touch with her old friend Clarissa) when I thought Groff was veering too much in the entertainment direction, verging on sit-com; the dialogue of these two women, both extremely accomplished and intelligent (Clarissa can read a novel in an hour) reminds me what I didn’t like in Fates and Furies, the fact that everyone was so accomplished and full of repartee.  Groff has lost that tendency in her more recent fiction, and I’m glad.  She doesn’t need to entertain us.  She has important things to say.

I’m at this point a real Groff fan, including the fact that she’s just opened a bookstore in Florida to sell all the books that the schools are banning down there.  (The best publicity for any book is to ban it!  Ban my book, Ron DaSantis!  Please!)  But it’s no slight to this book to say that the later ones are better.  She has deepened as a novelist.

I understand that her characters tend to be accomplished and extraordinary because she is.  But she needs to remember that most of the world isn’t that way.

[1] I realize that the distinction between literary novels and commercial ones is a false distinction.  Groff has managed to accomplish both things, as have a number of writers.  But Stephen King is a case in point.  I’ve tried to read his work, I really have.  (And I think his book on writing is excellent, the best of the how to write manuals.)  The man has an extremely fertile mind, and a serviceable style.  But the writing isn’t literary.  It’s commercial, and often rather sloppy.  The guy is in such a hurry to put out another 1000-page novel that he doesn’t have time to take care with this one.  He wants to be taken more seriously as a literary figure, but he hasn’t made himself a serious author.  He’s had his reward (to say the least).