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2.0 out of 5 stars
The Many Consequences of Obsessions, Oct 1 2001
Before reviewing this book, let me warn potential readers that this book contains much off-color language and disgusting details of extreme sexual misbehavior. This is not your normal Jane Langton novel where some sedate professor performs a fairly clean murder. Instead, there is a relatively uneducated serial killer of a most disgusting sort involved. To me, the gross aspects of the serial killer were not essential to the story, and simply lessened the appeal of the book. Almost all of the characters in Murder at Monticello are obsessed by some aspect of Jeffersonï¿s life or of the Lewis and Clark expedition into the newly purchased Louisiana Territory. A July 4th celebration of the bicentennial year of Jeffersonï¿s becoming the third president draws these characters to Monticello in Charlottesville, Virginia. While some characters are looking forward to the big fireworks show, others are planning to make their own fireworks. The familiar Homer and Mary Kelly come down from Cambridge, Massachusetts at the invitation of a friend who offers them a free place to stay. A former student, Fern Fisher, is working on a new biography of Jefferson to help improve his reputation despite having been a slave holder and having possibly had sexual relations with one of his slaves, who was the half-sister of his deceased wife. Augustus Upchurch, a local benefactor of Jefferson studies, has helped raise the money to fund the book, but also becomes interested in Ms. Fisher despite the wide difference in their ages. Ms. Fisher sees apparitions of Jefferson in and around Monticello. Tom Dean, a local man who is about to enter medical school, is fascinated by Lewis and Clark, and through this meets Ms. Fisher and extends his interests to include her. The local police chief owns the Oxford English Dictionary and spends his free time looking up what the words in the Declaration of Independence meant in Jeffersonï¿s time. The serial killer imagines himself being related to one of the men in the Lewis and Clark expedition, based on having been raised on the Missouri River in Bismarck, North Dakota. Homer Kelly starts reading up on Lewis and Clark. Each chapter begins with a quote from the expeditionï¿s journals. Like all Homer and Mary Kelly stories, thereï¿s not much mystery here. There are simply tangled skeins of lives and story lines that overlap. The individual stories are more of an excuse to delve into a particular period of history than serious fiction. Being quite familiar with Jefferson and the Lewis and Clark expedition, the only new knowledge that the book imparted were more details than I wanted to know about the sexual habits of the men on the expedition. The overall theme of Murder at Monticello is that obsessions are bad for us, because they blind us to more positive opportunities to connect with others and more meaningful activities. Unless you feel a compulsive need to read all of these stories by Ms. Langton, I suggest you skip this one. Of her recent efforts, I thought that Dead as a Dodo was far superior to Murder at Monticello. The ideas developed in that book about Darwin are far more interesting than the slim intellectual foundation of Murder at Monticello. I do like Ms. Langtonï¿s new habit of taking the Kellys to new locations outside of Massachusetts. I hope Ms. Langton continues this trend in her upcoming novels. Search for the opportunities to expand goodness, and then act on them!
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