An Ancient Gesture

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.”

The Rowing Lesson

I recently finished Anne Landsman’s The Rowing Lesson, which I find very difficult to describe. That is most likely because it’s the most difficult contemporary novel I’ve read in a long while. It’s written in 2nd person, a point of view that both directly engages and alienates the reader through its direct address of the reader and its effect on the stream of consciousness style narrative. Set in South Africa, it takes place in two periods of time. The story alternates between recollections of a man’s childhood and his daughter’s experience at his death bed years later. 

The experience I had reading was a rare one. In reading, I would come across passages so beautiful that whole metaphors and sentences began to stick in my mind. I would read sentences over and over, marveling at the perfection and beauty of Landman’s writing. It’s a novel I feel that I need to read again at some point. I highly recommend it. 

And I must include some favorite passages: 

……but you can’t really shout these days, not too loudly, since across the seas there are blackshirts and brownshirts and here there are greyshirts, special South African Nazis, picked and pickled in our own backyard and they’re on the streets and at school and you don’t even know where else you might find them, marching and goosestepping and acting like sour Krauts. It’s no joke when you’re two bricks and a tickey high and you turn the corner and there they are, thick and blond, a band of Afrikaans boys furious about the Boer War and the Depression and English money and Jewish shops. No one has thrown the first stone although you’ve seen plenty of glass all over the newspapers, Jews in Germany sweeping up glass and of course the ones who died that night, the Night of Broken Glass.

and…

You see women walking up and down the street, their skirts bouncing around their hips, wearing gloves and hats and jackets, crisp and city smart, city slickers with their heels clicking on the pavement. They’re smoking and laughing and talking. Their lips are red and their hair is soft, and they’re all city girls. Their scent drifts past you and it makes you dizzy and you almost faint. Lead me into temptation, please lead me there, you’re begging them but they can’t hear you. They keep on walking and talking and they don’t see you standing there, your eyes big and dark, and your nose pointing East then South. A regular old compass! That should help me get around you’re thinking, as you pick up your things and try to find your way to Groote Schuur. I’ll just follow my nose. 

You’re on another train, to Mowbray this time, each crunch of the wheels bringing you closer and closer to the hospital. People are sitting on benches and smoking. The windows are streaked with grime, and you peer out. The mountain’s still there, I was just checking. There’s a girl sitting opposite you and her knee bumps into yours. You say you’re sorry but it’s her leg that did it, that scraped your pant and took the skin off your heart. She’s wearing stockings, isn’t she, and where do they end? Your eye lands like a fly on her skirt, in her lap. Her hand is there resting, and she could brush you away, just like that, but she doesn’t. There are flecks of white and yellow and pink in the brown of her skirt, stars floating around in the brown night of her lap. You feel yourself sinking and swooping into the folds, floating and swirling, until you get sucked in, doing somersaults all the way, right down the drain.

Next up: Lauren Groff’s The Monsters of Templeton

A Novel Challenge

I stumbled upon this blog, A Novel Challenge, that proposes various book challenges to complete by the end of 2009. I’ve decided to give a couple a go. I’ll be reading at least 12 books over the course of 12 months, and writing a review of each book I read. Part of the instructions are to set my list of books before the New Year and commit to it. I’ve been thinking about it quite a bit. Here are my tentative picks (in no particular order):

1. 2666-Roberto Bolano
2. Anna Karenina-Leo Tolstoy
3. I Love You, Beth Cooper-Larry Boyle
4. Cost-Roxana Robinson
5. The Waves-Virginia Woolf
6. Lush Life-Richard Price
7. Wise Blood-Flannery O’Connor
8. The Wind-up Bird Chronicle-Haruki Murakami
9. Motherless Brooklyn-Jonathan Lethem
10. The Monsters of Templeton-Lauren Groff
11. Consider the Lobster: And other Essays-David Foster Wallace
12. The Mistress’s Daughter-A.M. Homes

Runner’s Up: 

1. The Red Leather Diary-Lily Koppel
2. Breakfast of Champions-Kurt Vonnegut
3. Midnight’s Children-Salman Rushdie
4. The Brothers Karamazov-Fyodor Dostoevsky
5. Runaway-Alice Munro
6. Against Interpretation-Susan Sontag

Sometimes I think book clubs and the like are a little silly, but ever since I graduated college I find my reading habits to be very frantic. This will be a nice way to sort out a list of books I want to read, and set a goal throughout the year to fulfill it. I’ll post my final list after New Years.