Photo of Lake Ostego in Cooperstown by birdyboo, via Flickr
The Monsters of Templeton-Entry 1
Willie Upton is a woman displaced from graduate school, pregnant at home in the tiny town, Templeton, NY, a town based on Cooperstown, the namesake of James Fenimore Cooper and the hometown of the author Lauren Groff. As a person obsessed with literature and history I am falling in love with The Monsters of Templeton. It appeals to that insatiable fantasy many have of understanding the lives of our idols, whose stories become almost mythological. I’m waiting to see where the dead monster found in Lake Glimmerglass fits in, but I’m fascinated by Willie’s discovery of her enigmatic ancestry. She is the perfect protagonist, someone that has enviable qualities; she’s smart, beautiful, inquisitive, and she’s descended from literary greatness and inextricably connected to the history of Templeton. She’s a character one wants to emulate, but who has also made grave mistakes that endear me to her ever more.
Here’s an excerpt from the Sarah Franklin Temple Upton chapter…p. 100
…days pass, days pass, dark then light, Templeton glowing in the fog, the brilliance of the noon..the little shrill girl is back, makes me want to bludgeon my head with a carpet beater until she’s out…so many ghosts in the water I see now, every day I go down, press my ear close to the water until I drench the small hairs on the lobe…beseeching, mournful. The men have bloated skin, and the women’s hair has come loose and floats cloudlike behind them, sunnies and pumpkinseed-fish scattered in it…a man with my father’s face, wrists blooming roses of blood…two brothers with frosted lashes and lips, ice skates on their feet, pounding at the surface as if it were glass…small Indian girl who looks at me with serene and unforgiving eyes as she floats, naked, bruises like plums on her thighs…soldier in olive drab, the stumps of his legs looking tender as a baby’s skin…young men in boater-hats, young women in tight waists and bellish skirts from before the Civil War…summer-camp children with crude leather bracelets on their wrists…fat old ice fisherman…parachutist from my childhood, the man who leapt from the plane at the County Fair, but hit water, not land, whose chute settled on the lake like a flower, filled with the water, dragged him under before the boats could reach him. Yes: every day I see more of them, the drowned ones. It is perhaps not madness: they are so clear, and I am not terrified by them. Is it? I don’t know…
That excerpt is from my favorite chapter so far in the novel, which contains excerpts of Willie’s great-grandmother Sarah’s journal, a woman who appeared to be schizophrenic. Above, she contemplates her “madness.”
