Anita Shreve has written 14 books and I have read every one of them. Some are historical, most contemporary, many have a dark streak, all explore the frailty of the human condition in some form or other. I’ve loved all of them, but not in the same way, and her latest book, Testimony, takes the reader on yet a different ride.
It starts with private-school headmaster Mike Bordwin watching a tape that shows three of his students, all of them star basketball players, engaged in sexual activity with an underage girl. The girl is no innocent – the word “vixen” springs to at least one character’s mind – but when teenage hormones combine with alcohol, the potent soup she stirs up causes reverberations that go a lot further than the dorm room they are in, echoing into the future for all of them, and robbing the future for one. What happens next, and what has happened just before, leaks out of the book in Anita’s expert hands, as different participants in the story – including the girl, the boys, their parents and Mike – share their vantage points.
Jodie Picoult wrote this year’s popular Change of Heart using a similar device and it allows the reader to get into the heads of more than one character, while giving the writer the freedom to explore different voices. The trouble is that sometimes you favour some characters over others. At the beginning of the book, for example, I thought Mike was a bit feeble, but by the end, I wanted to grow extra legs to kick him sufficiently in the seat of his pants. On the plus side, there are plenty of other characters with whom to sympathise, especially Silas, the good student who would no doubt have been voted least likely to be involved in a sex scandal. Why would a promising young sportsman with everything ahead of him throw it all away for one night with a dozen cans of beer and a flirt who can’t hold a candle to his heartbroken girlfriend, Noelle? Why indeed? Therein lies the addictive allure of the latest Anita Shreve.
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