I've been plundering
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rachelmanija's books and couldn't pass up the opportunity to finally read
The Grounding of Group 6, which I'd heard of for ages but had never come across before. What a
strange book.
All I knew beforehand was that this was a novel about a group of kids who, on some sort of hike, find out that their parents had sent them to a boarding school and paid to have them murdered. It's not remotely the book I expected from that premise: instead, it's something much weirder and more human.
The kids in Group 6 are Marigold, Coke, Sully, Sarah, and Ludi; their "advisor" is Nat Rittenhouse. Coke and Sully are only of mild interest to me, but the girls and Nat are fantastic.
Marigold was raised by "more enlightened than thou" parents who were enthusiastic about attachment-free sex; their brief promise to practice exclusively "home cooking" is broken when her mother falls in love and sexy poolside abandonment. Marigold sees and decides to get a pointed revenge for the broken promise and goes off and seduces her mother's lover and offhandedly informing her mother of it. (Power move, Marigold. Respect.) In a way, she has the stablest and best family life, so take from that what you will. She's a constant actress, skilled at pretending to feel less than she feels, to be more cynical than she is. (Though she does seem honest in being totally unsurprised that her parents, or anyone's parents, would murder their kids if they could get away with it, and she makes some good points about historical precedent. The book loves these kids, but it's oddly nonjudgmental about contracted child murder. It basically works as a stand-in for the severing of parental love generally.)
Sarah is the oldest daughter of a father who demanded complete, clean-cut perfection from his children, all the better to fit with his self-image of total competence and flawless social position. Saran--smart, sporty, and dogged--basically
was perfect, until her anxiety over compositions got the best of her and she plagiarized a series of essays. One mistake is all it takes. She's dead to her father, and he's determined to make her dead in every other sense, too.
Okay, up to this point, we are in a relatively normal world. Marigold's life has been atypical, but it's atypical in a recognizable, known way. Coke and Sully's stories are fairly normal.
And now, this:
Ludi's father wants her dead because Ludi is slightly psychic. Just offhandedly. It's never really a huge plot point beyond this--she gets a couple of feelings that guide her in the correct direction, but her psychic skills don't let her crucially save the day. Her real superpower is being the actual best. She's deeply moral and clearsighted without being judgmental, she's kind, she's passionate. The relationship she forms with Nat is borderline inappropriate, which the novel and Nat both acknowledge, but I find it impossibly to either begrudge Ludi anything she wants or to doubt that she knows what she's doing. She has a really great core certainty and is probably my favorite character of the book.
And in an even more bananas bit of back-story, we have Nat, a just-out-of-college drifter and woods enthusiast who dabbled in compulsive gambling and bet a year's tuition on a coin flip and lost. To an assistant bursar with a minor crime boss uncle. Who persuades him he is now deeply in debt to the state of Vermont, which he considers trying to repay by referring tourists who will vouch that they came there because Nat recommended it. And then he almost repays his debt to the assistant bursar's uncle by taking a boat, leaving it in a harbor until someone puts (presumably) cocaine onto it, and then sailing it back. Instead, someone puts the severed body parts of the would-be drug courier on the boat, so now Nat also has to pay the trip expenses. He's offered the job of killing the kids of Group 6--he'll take them on a hike, poison their fruit drink, and dump their bodies in a bottomless quarry on the school's property. Unbeknownst to Nat, he's also lined up for elimination--after he bumps off the kids, one of the school's teachers will sniper-shoot him.
Add into this the sadistic "Doctor" who runs the school and speaks almost exclusively in sentences that trail off into song lyrics, a teacher who can't stop having sex fantasies and critical opinions about everyone who comes within a hundred yards of her, the assistant bursar low-level enforcer who just wants to eat Milky Ways and take his girlfriend to a nice hotel, tons of bizarre local color, and so on.
Group 6 arrives at the school and are shuttled off to a couple of days of hiking with their "teacher," Nat, who is disconcerted by how much he immediately likes these kids, all of whom are trying their best to make friends and have a fresh start. He also starts to have an uneasy feeling about being set up, so he misleads the school as to where he'll be taking the kids. He takes them to "Spring Lake Lodge," a little cabin he built (which they soon expand), and confirms that the school is after him, too. The whole group finds out the truth and they then enter into the world's most laidback game of cat-and-mouse. (The enforcer doesn't really want to find them, having no real desire to kill anybody; the school does want to kill them, but also doesn't want to go to a lot of work. Fair enough.)
Ostensibly, Group 6 is hiding out in the woods until the school's search for them dies down, but they soon fall into a kind of malaise, unsure of what kind of future they'll have. They go back and forth between Spring Lake Lodge and a Swiss chalet that's left unattended during the week; sometimes they run into town for condoms and fashionable vests. They gradually settle into relationships--first Coke and Marigold, then Sarah and Sully, and eventually Ludi and Nat, who seem meant-to-be in their general floaty good intentions, but who quibble a little over the age difference and whether or not they should be having sex yet. (Ludi votes yes.) There's a startling frankness to the sex in the book that I don't think I even see in YA now--I told
rachelmanija that it reminded me of seventies movies, where everything is sort of grubby and human and unpolished, and it all moves at its own pace. I really like this quality. The book is partly about learning how to live, and the answers it gives are much more low-key and matter-of-fact than they would be now.
The book sort of ambles along. The group decides that they ideally would like to integrate into the school--okay then--and blackmail their parents into providing for their education, etc. All they have to do is find the letters their parents sent to Doctor, requesting their deaths. Circumstances gradually push them and their pursuers closer together until a confrontation finally occurs (in a very good, tense scene), but the real denouement is just knowing that these characters will all settle into their futures.
It's just a much stranger, more character-based novel than anyone would guess from the premise. (You also wouldn't guess that it would include a bursar sending his assistant to murder someone for the sake of the state of Vermont, either.) It's a warmhearted hangout novel studded with surreal, blackly comedic looks at crotchety teachers plotting murder. If I'd read this as a kid, I think what would stick with me more than anything else are the characters and the principles they develop. I think even now, those things will linger. And while I'd still happily read the straightforward thriller version of this book or one with genuinely bad kids, I'm so pleased this exists in its current form. It makes me feel better about the world that something this distinct and personal could become a minor cultural landmark.
