Book: The Monsters of Templeton
Author: Lauren Goff
Published: 2008 (Voice)
Pages: 361
Excellent premise: a lake monster surfaces in a small New
England town, supposedly bringing up all sorts of family/town secrets with it
from the murky depths. Down-on-her-luck town daughter returns from her plane
crash affair of an academic career and starts to dig in. Neat, huh?
Yeah, except the monster didn’t have anything to do with
much of anything except itself. I loved its parts, where it surfaced and how it
sunk back down after the town had its fun and mystery scavenged to death, but
they were those sort of makeshift bookends you use when you don’t want to pay
like $50 for the real, matching-set thing.
In the middle, the daughter does a serviceable job of
scrounging up her family’s history and pasting it together with the town’s to
find out who her real dad was. There were bits from old letters and diaries and
portraits that made for good changes of tone when the present day tone started
to feel too much like an “are you my daddy?” episode of a daytime talk show.
Not like Maury or anything, not that bad, but maybe one of Oprah’s adoption
reveal specials. (She did those, right? If not, imagine she did. Or sell her
that idea for me and give me 100% commission.)
But the problem is, the central ancestry mystery never
seemed all that urgent by itself and it never integrated hints of or explicit
elements of magical realism connected with the lake monster like I thought it
would. The girl’s mom literally doesn’t tell her who her dad is because. Just
because. It gives the anthropologist daughter a good human puzzle to work on,
but honestly, the solution doesn’t really change anything for her.
I was also looking forward to the collective voice that
Groff uses so well in a couple of her short stories. It seemed perfect for this
kind of town-as-a-character mix I thought she was trying to get, but the only
collective voice is the group of guys who run together every morning and have
for the last couple decades; again, nice idea, but it ends up falling into
broad general guys-getting-old stuff that squanders chances to add any sort of
real character to the town.
Sigh. I dunno, I still liked this book, but it was a lot
more gossipy than ethereal, so I guess I’ll leave it piled somewhere until my
new bookshelf starts getting full and so will my baseboard spaces and I’ll have
to make a decision to keep from drowning in words (but what a beautiful way to
die!).
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