In a windowless room in the basement of the schoolhouse, six people sit at a long table on a raised wooden stage. Three folding chairs face them from the floor below, one for the student and two for her parents. The room was designed this way deliberately, so that the Honor Board looks down on whoever has been summoned. Nothing about the layout has been updated since the last century. The Thoroughbreds by Elin Hilderbrand and Shelby Cunningham puts one seventeen-year-old in that chair and expels her, and a reading group will spend most of an evening arguing about everyone in the building who should have been sitting there beside her.
The Chorus Is the Point
The most interesting decision in The Thoroughbreds by Elin Hilderbrand is who tells it.
About a dozen people get close-third chapters. The woman running the place. The man paid to get them into college. The boy who throws the ball, the girl with the followers, the man in the kitchen, the man with the ring of keys. Threaded between all of them are chapters narrated by the entire student body at once, in the first person plural. We roll down our windows. We check our phones. And we really zone out. It is a Greek chorus in Gazelles and a plum Goyard tote, and it does what a chorus is for: it watches, it judges, it knows more than any one person in the building and understands considerably less.
Groups will want to talk about what that we includes and excludes. It is warm about some people and merciless about others, and it never once admits to being either.
What Elin Hilderbrand Does With Money
The school’s financial crisis is the engine, and it is the best thing in the book.
The head of school discovers in September that a quarter of her operating budget is gone, lost by an adviser who moved her accounts without her really reading the paperwork. She hides it for eight months. Around that runs a second economy entirely: a board president who bought his son a written exemption from every school rule, a chef working off an old embezzlement charge, a father who offers a blank cheque to keep his daughter enrolled, a boy who arrives with his belongings in a bin liner and a room already furnished by a stranger’s kindness.
The Thoroughbreds by Elin Hilderbrand never lectures about any of it. It itemises. Tuition is seventy-two thousand a year. The scholarship stipend is two hundred a semester, a figure the board has overlooked for years. A gay quarterback loses five college offers in a single autumn and nobody will say why. The novel simply sets the numbers down and lets a group do the arithmetic.
The Girl Nobody Was Rooting For
The real achievement of The Thoroughbreds by Elin Hilderbrand is a character the first book used as a punchline.
Olivia Hudezech-Tottingknaffer has spent three years attaching herself to whichever girl is currently ascendant, and the novel is unsparing about what that has cost her. She is told to her face, in one of the cruellest scenes here, exactly how the school sees her: not disliked so much as pitied, a person who let being used become her entire personality. Her response is to go looking for something that will burn the place down.
What she does with it is the question worth putting to a group, because the answer is neither redemption nor revenge, and it arrives in a dark tunnel in a borrowed red dress.
Where Elin Hilderbrand Loses Control
Not everything holds.
- The ending forgives everyone. Nearly every departure announced across the school year is reversed in the final chapters, and the effect is less satisfying than weightless.
- One storyline is badly misjudged. A relationship between a man in his thirties and a sixteen-year-old is treated as scandal and gossip rather than crime, and the adults who discover it simply withdraw the girl from school.
- The English teacher belongs in another novel. His subplot is pure farce, in a book that also handles suicide, overdose and an unplanned pregnancy.
- The cast strains the page count. Twelve viewpoints across four hundred pages means several of them resolve in a paragraph.
Against that, the prose is brisk and funny, the set pieces are superb, and one chapter of The Thoroughbreds by Elin Hilderbrand written as a multiple-choice examination paper is the most formally daring thing either author has published.
Questions Worth Arguing About
Start with the head of school. She conceals a catastrophic loss for eight months out of fear, then declines a bribe that would have solved it. Ask the group whether the second act cancels the first, and whether they would have taken the money.
Then ask about the exemption. A father purchases a written guarantee that his son will never be disciplined, never fail a class, never be subject to the rules everyone else lives under. The boy turns out well. He turns out, by the last chapter, better than well. Ask the group whether that outcome makes the arrangement defensible, and who paid for it in his place.
Finally, ask about the girl in the folding chair. She supplied the drugs and she was rude about it, and across the whole of The Thoroughbreds by Elin Hilderbrand she is the only person who faces a formal consequence for anything at all. Ask the group to name three characters who did worse and walked away clean, then ask what the actual difference between them was.
Groups that want more should start with The Academy, which this book assumes you have read and does not recap. Swan Song suits a group that liked the whole-community narration and wants it applied to adults. I Could Give You the Moon by Ann Liang is the choice for anyone drawn to elite-school economics and teenagers performing a version of themselves. And Switzy by Emma Cline shows what a school like this does to a man half a century after he leaves it.
What It Leaves Behind
On the final day, two girls prise a neon sign off a dorm wall. It reads COMPARISONS ARE ODIOUS, in lime-green cursive, and it has sat in the background of every video its owner posted that year. She commissioned it as a rebuke to her followers, a small act of moral instruction from a girl with one point eight million of them. It takes her until graduation to work out that she was the one who needed telling.
That sign is what The Thoroughbreds by Elin Hilderbrand finally hands a reading group. This is a school that ranks its children continuously and in public: by grade point average, by college letter, by whose family endowed the library, by a gossip column in the student paper. The novel is far kinder to those children than it is to the institution, and it lets almost every adult off at the end. A group will disagree about whether that generosity is the book’s warmth or its failure of nerve, which is a very good reason to put it on the list.