The Monsters of Templeton
A major computer snit has interrupted the flow of postings to my LJ, as has the beginning of the undergraduate semester. I closed the month of August with exactly 60 titles completed, but I'm eight behind in the matter of reviewing.
My college-instructor in-laws, who live not far from Cooperstown, NY, suggested I pick up The Monsters of Templeton, by Lauren Groff. Templeton is a fictional Cooperstown, as explained in the Author's Note.
Groff is an author whose short stories I've noted a couple of times before, in Best American Short Stories collections, so I moved her book to the head of the list. It's an enjoyable read, so I'm happy both for the recommendation, and the choice to read it now.
The Monsters of Templeton is part magic realism, part contemporary fiction, part historical novel. Literary magic realism lite, is probably the best description. It's an interesting cross-genre combination.
The story is set primarily in modern time, and the first-person female narrator is in a heap of trouble. It kicks right into gear with the first sentence: The day I returned to Templeton steeped in disgrace, the fifty-foot corpse of a monster surfaced in Lake Glimmerglass. The author is a descendant of the founder of Templeton, which means she's also a relative of James Fennimore Cooper (fictionally Temple). The plot requires her to inquire into her ancestry, and that leads to historical chapters on the many generations of Temples, as well as some of Cooper's best known fictional characters, who are just as real, in this novel, as the author who created them.
It just so happens that I was reading the early chapters of David McCullough's The Greater Journey at the same time as reading Groff, and both had discussions of Cooper's history, and Cooper's time in Europe. This enriched the experience, odd though it was.
The main narrator is Willie Upton, but there are other POV sections as well. One nice recurrent device is a first person plural narrator, The Running Buds, based on an actual running group, we find out. The alternate POVs are a device Groff manages brilliantly.
Willie Upton, though, was a challenge for this reader. She makes a number of choices in her life that this reader has little sympathy with, and (and this is the great risk of first-person narratives) that kept me from fully engaging with the character. I engaged with the story, but I never did really accept the character.
There are great descriptions, three of which I am extracting to teach my students. On pages 188-9 there is an excellent paragraph, from which I will share one sentence: In the movie of my memory, she [her mother] comes up the hill as grim and huge as a terrible troll, accompanied by organ music in a minor chord.
CBsIP: The Wallet of Kai Lung, Ernest Bramah
Mapping the World, David Adès
The Switching Yard, Jan Beatty
Claims for Poetry, Donald Hall, ed.
Writing Poems 5th edition, Michelle Boisseau & Robert Wallace
The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris, David McCullough
Panzer Leader, Heinz Guderian
My college-instructor in-laws, who live not far from Cooperstown, NY, suggested I pick up The Monsters of Templeton, by Lauren Groff. Templeton is a fictional Cooperstown, as explained in the Author's Note.
Groff is an author whose short stories I've noted a couple of times before, in Best American Short Stories collections, so I moved her book to the head of the list. It's an enjoyable read, so I'm happy both for the recommendation, and the choice to read it now.
The Monsters of Templeton is part magic realism, part contemporary fiction, part historical novel. Literary magic realism lite, is probably the best description. It's an interesting cross-genre combination.
The story is set primarily in modern time, and the first-person female narrator is in a heap of trouble. It kicks right into gear with the first sentence: The day I returned to Templeton steeped in disgrace, the fifty-foot corpse of a monster surfaced in Lake Glimmerglass. The author is a descendant of the founder of Templeton, which means she's also a relative of James Fennimore Cooper (fictionally Temple). The plot requires her to inquire into her ancestry, and that leads to historical chapters on the many generations of Temples, as well as some of Cooper's best known fictional characters, who are just as real, in this novel, as the author who created them.
It just so happens that I was reading the early chapters of David McCullough's The Greater Journey at the same time as reading Groff, and both had discussions of Cooper's history, and Cooper's time in Europe. This enriched the experience, odd though it was.
The main narrator is Willie Upton, but there are other POV sections as well. One nice recurrent device is a first person plural narrator, The Running Buds, based on an actual running group, we find out. The alternate POVs are a device Groff manages brilliantly.
Willie Upton, though, was a challenge for this reader. She makes a number of choices in her life that this reader has little sympathy with, and (and this is the great risk of first-person narratives) that kept me from fully engaging with the character. I engaged with the story, but I never did really accept the character.
There are great descriptions, three of which I am extracting to teach my students. On pages 188-9 there is an excellent paragraph, from which I will share one sentence: In the movie of my memory, she [her mother] comes up the hill as grim and huge as a terrible troll, accompanied by organ music in a minor chord.
CBsIP: The Wallet of Kai Lung, Ernest Bramah
Mapping the World, David Adès
The Switching Yard, Jan Beatty
Claims for Poetry, Donald Hall, ed.
Writing Poems 5th edition, Michelle Boisseau & Robert Wallace
The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris, David McCullough
Panzer Leader, Heinz Guderian