Strolling down memory lane

Over at Lizzie’s, there’s a rather enthusiastic discussion of great YA novels from the past. Some of the usual suspects, of course — Danziger, Zindel, Duncan, M.E. Kerr — but the book getting the most play in the comments is Julian F. Thompson’s THE GROUNDING OF GROUP SIX. I do a fair amount of shrieking over there but it’s for good reason — I love that damn book and I’ve lost count how many times I have read it.

I think I was about thirteen or fourteen when I found it lurking on a used bookstore shelf somewhere downtown. I picked it up and was immediately entranced by the cover: six scruffy, sullen looking teens who had a sense of togetherness against the world. Then I read the back copy and really got intrigued — a group of sixteen year olds striking out into the woods to bond before going to an elite prep school in the Northeast as lead by someone not much older than them? Interesting, especially since it bore absolutely no resemblance whatsoever to my life. So I bought it, read a few pages when I got home, and got totally hooked.

Because GROUNDING isn’t exactly a typical teen novel. Oh no. These five kids, they were sent to prep school not to get their lives straightened out, but to be killed. As specifically requested by their parents, who simply didn’t want them around anymore. And their leader, one Nathaniel P. Rittenhouse, he only took the job because he was deeply in debt after falling in love with sports gambling in college and was sworn up and down that these kids were the lowest of the low, the worst of the dregs.

But of course, that’s not the case. Coke and Sully and Sara and Marigold and Ludi are pretty bright, kind of dreamy, determined or aimless but all extremely interesting teens. Thompson does a marvellous job depicting their individual quirks and how they band together — sometimes in the usual way, but most times not — to face their silent tormentors and strike back against the school and their parents. By the end of the book, I loved them all and wished I could hang out with them again and again, but unfortunately, the only way to do so was to reread the book. Over and over.

At the time I didn’t really get the satirical aspects but a recent reread brought those home. Thompson has a wry way of depicting authority figures, some clued out, others sorta but not really evil, just baseless. And while the moral, that parents should do a hell of a better job understanding their children and how they might not fit into their overall plans, is somewhat exaggerated, Thompson makes his point with great writing and humor that it works all the same. 

In this interview with the Princeton Alumni newsletter from 1999 (he graduated in 1949) Thompson (the eponymous son of a lawyer who wrote plays as a hobby) speaks about why he added novelist to his resume of being an educator and coach for over twenty years:

What fuels Thompson’s writing is his sympathy for teenagers and their growing pains. Of the many titles he’s held, the one he values most is "friend." "I have their talk in my head," Thompson says. "I’ve got great respect for teenagers. In our society, many people judge them harshly, rage against things like if they wear a baseball cap backwards. To me they’ve always been so honest, so sweet, so open."

While still a teen himself, Thompson coached baseball, and during free time from history studies at Princeton he visited juveniles at the State Home for Boys in Jamesburg, New Jersey. After graduation, he returned to his high school, the Lawrenceville School, to teach and direct boarding school students. Later he helped 13 expelled public-school students, accused of inciting the 1967 riots in Trenton, earn diplomas. He also helped a group of teens found an alternative high school called Changes in East Orange, New Jersey, where for seven years he served as administrator, teacher, counselor, even janitor. "I understood where they were coming from," he says of these youngsters. "It was just given to me to be that way, to be sympathetic to feelings adolescents have as they try to work out where they are trying to go."

The film rights to GROUNDING never got anywhere, but it would make a great movie, no question. Even if someone had a bright idea to cast Lindsay Lohan as one of the girls…