Basso Profundo: generational saga

Congratulations to Lauren Groff on publishing such a full and thought-provoking novel. Templeton's first and foremost monster dies in the lake by the little village - goes belly-up and, being the size of a bus, is winched up on the dock and sheltered from the sun by a canopy. Of course, the title has a plural noun, but I didn't find anyone else in the book particularly monstrous, at least in the present.

Groff unfolds a historic backdrop for Templeton's current cast - complete with a long story on the town's founder and a family tree. These are the real monsters, I guess. There are more rogues here than you can count; there's also insanity, serial murder, serial arson, more children born out of wedlock than within it. And that brings us to Willie Upton, the story's heroine, who undertakes a quest to find her father among the town's affable men in the generation before her.

"The Monsters of Templeton" is a noble effort - full and mature. I felt the tiniest bit like it lacked a focus - diverting descriptions, unnecessary plot directions - and became indistinct. It's a terrific first effort, make no mistake, but if Ms. Groff comes out with subsequent work that's praised, you'd do all right to start with that.

Powerful, sweeping, epic, gripping, brutally honest - these things and more describe Jeffrey Lent's debut novel, "In the Fall."

We meet one of the key players, a monster named Lex Mebane, quite late in the book. He owns and tries to rape a young slave woman, Leah, during the Civil War. She happens to be his half-sister and about the same age as he. She crowns him with a frying pan, leaves him in a heap, escapes North Carolina, and reaches Vermont in the company of a returning veteran named Norman Pelham. This book captures the outrage that the marriage of the two engenders.

The grandson of this union, Foster Pelham, is sixteen at the conclusion of this story, and travels from Vermont with his girlfriend to North Carolina to try to discover what happened. He finds Lex alive and unrepentant, but unable to control his desire to tell Foster the story. He does so and wants Foster to deliver some kind of retribution. Foster declines, preferring to leave him there with his memory and debilitating guilt.

The characters in this novel act from real and understandable motives; they not only engage us, they make us live our lives alongside them. This book's length and epic subject exhausted and exhilarated me. It is stunning, weighty, vivid, and rewarding. It's quite perfectly unbelievable that this is Lent's first book.

Take it up! Take it up!