Those Wicked Things We Know

About those places

The Monsters of Templeton by Lauren Groff

You are a young woman and naturally, because you are a bookish type, you are extremely nervous. Your personal life has, let us say, some aspects to it that are not quite conventional. Like all girls, you are not like the others. A bad thing has befallen you. No, scratch that. Make it two. Two bad things. They’ve befallen you and you are not to blame. You insist you are not to blame. But it has happened to you. These two things have happened to you — first the one thing, then the other — and it is not your fault.

You do feel bad. It’s the shame, you see; it’s shame and the prospect of responsibility to come. You’re not a little girl any more. You are not a little girl any more.

And you return from a foreign spell to what was once home. You return to realise that your hometown, the place you longed to leave, the place you hoped most of all to escape from, contains people who you thought you knew — but who are in fact different from what you remembered. They’re not as you thought.

You notice that you don’t know some people — they’re close to you, in theory — half as well as you thought you did. And now, as revelations fall onto your tender forehead like raindrops, you retreat to your bedroom while your mother looks after you a little and ladles a little poison of gossip into your ear of her very own, just for your own good. Everyone else is doing it.

And there is a story, isn’t there? There is a story — about the monster. There is a monster. And there is a story: about the monster that gave this town its character and form and shape. And all founding legends, they matter — you know they matter. They tell us so much, witting or not, about a place, about its secrets, about those things its people vainly seek to hide from others, from the light.

You watch them, the people. You watch them through the windows in your self-imposed exile. The ageing men who run around the neighbourhood. Trying to stay in shape. Hoping to see their ‘buds’ (friends, not flowers) in the mornings, rain or shine. You see their routines and regularities. What’s it about? you ask yourself.

Are they doing their best, you wonder, to keep the place safe? To maintain cosmic order? Do they do this much as monks in the great Trappist monasteries pray for the whole world, try to keep the whole world in order through their prayers? And do evil forces swirl around the jogging men like they do the monasteries. Evil swirl around like vortexes and catch laggards and those who are uncareful in snares from which they cannot escape? Vortexes in evil whose only answer is damnation?

You watch them from your window, all of these people. And you see your own father in a new light. You see your father in a new light, too. For it is what you have been told and you have nothing else to do as you think of what is now asked of you, the responsibility that is soon to be yours, and you think mostly about secrets. You have yours. Goodness knows, you have your own secrets. Who would think in an age like this? An age of modernity. But you have them, secrets. And the whole town must have secrets, must be deluged in them, must be digging them up — long buried — or surfacing them, long submerged, every time spade hits earth, every time a little civil engineering goes on. Surfacing secrets, bringing monsters — distant monsters — newly into the light.

And because you are American, everything in the outside world is really about you in some way. All this is also intertwined with your family history. It is all about you and your forebears, in the end. You ought to have known. You ought to have known; and as you look out of the windows you shelter behind, at the joggers outside and the streets you have known all your life (the streets you once sought to leave), you think yet more about the monster, the monster you know is somewhere out there, and you think about it and what it is like and why it is as it is. And why it is only you who can think clearly about any of this.

A novel of profound self-absorption, of self-consciousness so strong it physically disfigures the world that exists. It describes so much of life today, intentionally or not. A novel of nervous collapse: the natural state of America, of Americans, of life on earth.