Customer Reviews

Testimony

5 star:		(45)
4 star:		(46)
3 star:		(25)
2 star:		(13)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

Anita Shreve never plays it safe with her books and her latest, Testimony, is no exception.

Avery Academy is a small private school in Vermont. Everyone who attends has been carefully screened and selected to attend. From the rich young freshmen to the athletic seniors tapped for college play; no one attends Avery Academy by chance.

But for Avery Academy, all is not as it seems from outside its gates. Parties, which include alcohol and drugs, still occur and kids still get in trouble. This sets the scene for a horrible sex scandal from which no one will come out unscathed, not the students, not the parents, not the headmaster of the school; and not even the citizens of the town of Avery who don't even usually pay too much attention to what goes on behind the hallowed gates up on the hill just out of town. Parents find that even though they pay for the best education for their children, send them to the best schools available, they still can't protect them. Adults find that passionate desires can have far-reaching effects that can change lives forever.

Told from multiple points of view (I counted 20) in less talented hands the narration could get confusing. But with Shreve, it did not. Perhaps that was because with over a dozen of these narrators we only hear from them once or twice.

However the story essentially belongs to three people: Mike, the headmaster of the school who we get to know the best, and Silas and Noelle, the two star-crossed lovers; Silas the basketball star, the local boy made good, son of average farmers from the town of Avery and Noelle, the talented musician destined for Julliard. As the story of the events of that one evening of sex and alcohol unfolds it is becomes clear that Silas stands to lose it all. But what sets in place such behavior uncharacteristic of the normally mild-mannered youth is at the crux of the rest of the story.

A graphic beginning describes the events of that tragic evening; and this is so graphic that it could tend to turn off some readers, readers who may be unfamiliar with Shreve's work. But those who have come to know and trust Shreve as an author will be compelled to keep reading and be certainly glad they did as the events unfold, a bit at a time, through the voices of not only Mike, Silas, and Noelle, but parents, classmates, and the other students involved in the scandal. We also hear from a reporter who eventually wins the Pulitzer for his reporting of the events.

However as the story develops, readers see that the scandal is only the tip of the iceberg for a greater tragedy that will even more deeply affect those involved.

This is Shreve at her best. She tells a compelling story so eloquently that is one of those deemed "unputdownable" -- be sure to start this one early in the day so you will have plenty of time to finish as once you begin it, you will not be able to stop turning the pages.

A firestorm erupts when a dormitory parent confiscates a tape in which three boys engage in intimate acts with a fourteen-year-old girl at a private school. The young people who appear in the tape attend Avery Academy in Vermont. Anita Shreve's "Testimony" examines this incident from every possible angle, using a Rashomon-like approach. She demonstrates how difficult it is to learn the truth when various witnesses offer conflicting opinions about what happened and who should bear the responsibility.

Mike Bordwin, the headmaster of Avery Academy, is shocked when he views the tape and sees Robert Leicht, and Silas Quinney, both eighteen, and James Robles, nineteen, behaving inappropriately with a pretty young freshman after an evening of heavy drinking. The author provides many perspectives besides Bordwin's, including those of the participants, the parents, Silas's girlfriend, a newspaper reporter, a roommate of the victim, a police officer, a cafeteria worker, an ER nurse, the dean of students, and a law professor. It soon becomes apparent that the story changes according to who tells it, and that there is plenty of blame to go around.

Using a straightforward and powerful prose style, Anita Shreve explores a number of thought-provoking and timely themes: The abuse of alcohol among young people is "starting at an earlier age and [is] both more habitual and more intense that it had been just a decade before"; students who attend private schools and who are athletically talented may behave recklessly because they feel "privileged"; when reporters grab hold of a scandalous story, they often transform a human tragedy into a media circus; our misdeeds may destroy not only our lives but also those of our friends and family. "Testimony" is a searing and powerful indictment of a society that, in many ways, has lost its moral compass, and for that, everyone pays a price.

Beautifully written, TESTIMONY is a cautionary tale that explores the precipitating factors and aftermath of a student sex scandal at a private Vermont high school. Told through the alternating personal testimonies of 21 people involved or impacted, its creative structure is an all-out exploration of viewpoint: first-, third-, and even second-person, in past and present tenses.

The explosive premise brought to mind the Duke University lacrosse-team scandal and the local and national reactions to it. Short chapters drew me in, and the close-up points of view revealed character in a way that led to understanding and, in almost every case, sympathy. It was tricky at first to keep the characters straight while so many were being introduced. But as things progressed and an underlying story took hold, it became riveting. Highly Recommended.

When Mike Borden, the headmaster of a prestigious private school in Vermont, is handed a tape by his secretary, he isn't sure what to expect. He certainly doesn't expect to see two highly respected students and a third post-graduate student engaging in sexual intercourse with a 14 year old girl, but that's precisely what he does see. The last thing he anticipates is the explosive effect that this single tape - that this single evening - will have on so many lives, both in and out of the small town in which the private school is located.

This is quite an overwhelming book. The story is immensely more complex than I've just described, but it's very difficult not to give away any details and still write a summary. The author rotates viewpoints, featuring the girl, the boys, the headmaster, some of the parents, and other related people. It really reads like a collection of testimonies from all the players in the very serious events of those few days that determined many futures. At times this is disorienting. Each person's narrative is written in a distinct style so that they're easily distinguished, but it's very easy to lose track of where you are in the story, particularly when a person's chapter is only two or three pages long. They also skip around in the book's timeline, and as I read quickly, occasionally I'd wonder just what was happening with the other people at the time because it didn't seem clear to me. Perhaps if I had spent more time on each perspective, this wouldn't have mattered, but I also really wanted to work out just what happened.

On the other hand, the emotional power of this book is not to be missed. Anita Shreve carefully gathers in all the threads of her tale and brings it to a startling climax that you don't expect until only a page or two before it happens; looking back, however, you can see how the rest of the day's events led to it. It feels carefully crafted to evoke this particular outcome and to minutely examine how everyone felt about the tape.

In the end, I'd call this a very good book. It has compelling characters, a riveting plotline, and terrific attention to detail. The rotating viewpoints are a minor problem, but one that I could get past to enjoy the book. And I'm now compelled to add Anita Shreve to my "authors whose work I should read" list.

I think Anita Shreve is among a small handful of great contemporary writers. I look forward to each of her books. This novel, however, is not even close to her best work. As you proceed through the book, listening to almost two dozen voices, you realize, with growing dread and irritation, that you are witnessing a tragedy for no good reason. No lessons are learned. This is illustration without illumination. Bad things can happen- we know that. Moral ambiguity- we are familiar with that idea. Here no one escapes, all lives are ruined, everybody is trashed, and there is nothing redeeming to be found in the story. Even the style chosen, using first, second, and third party voices, is distracting and not the best way to display this author's remarkable talent with prose which usually, in the past, has approached poetry.

Testimony is a powerful novel that that weaves an intricate story of truth and consequences. It is told after-the-fact through the eyes of multiple people involved in the scandal. The title is actually a description of the book, as each of these people are giving testimony as to what happened that fateful night and how it affected them. This method provides mere glimpses into multiple lives, but allows for a more sophisticated understanding of how the consequences of the actions of a few individuals affected a wide range of people.

Because that's what this book is about - consequences. What are the consequences of a single action? How much do mistakes cost? How much should they cost? Are there crimes for which a person should pay his or her entire life? But it also delves deeper into the psyche than it seems. Was it just the fault of the boys on the tape? What about the girl, was she at fault? What about the circumstances surrounding each of the boys? If one of them was having a hard time at home, was the fact that he made a poor choice the fault of his home life?

I think the most delicate part of Testimony, and the part that will be the most discussed in book clubs and such, is whether the girl was at fault. It is clear from her portrayal in the novel that she is no innocent and knew what she was doing. At the same time, legally, the boys were responsible for their actions. It is a heinous and incredibly awkward thing to read about, and engenders internal conflict within the reader - whose side am I on? Is it really even a matter of sides, or is the whole thing so unthinkable that it just doesn't matter? It really provides fodder for thought and discussion.

This is a serious subject and one that is becoming all the more relevant as children are increasingly eager to become adults at younger and younger ages. There was one point made in Testimony that I thought was incredibly interesting. It was towards the very end, but is not any kind of a spoiler. One of the characters says, "I don't believe any of us...gave a single thought to the age difference. We knew there was a disparity, of course, but I think because we were all part of the same community, allowed to attend the same dances, even encouraged to attend the same dances, it never occurred to us that one girl might be off-limits while another wasn't." Of course, this is no excuse, but it does present an interesting point that I have never considered. It is definitely a book worth reading. I especially recommend it to book clubs because this is a book that will produce a lot of discussion.

4 and a half stars rounded up to 5

I am an Anita Shreve fan. The Weight of Water and The Pilot's Wife are two of my very favorite books. I really enjoy her style of writing and Testimony is no different. It is very well written and the way she tells the story from all the different viewpoints is really interesting. However, there is not one good thing in this whole book! It starts with a horribly uncomfortable chapter and then just goes from bad to worse. It's incredibly depressing - death, adultery, loss of life, loss of jobs, detestable characters - holy cow. I can appreciate a good tragedy as much as the next girl, but this was just down, down, down. I finished it and just felt icky - not a very lofty word, I know, but that's exactly how this book made me feel - icky.

I spent 4 years at a boarding school in upstate NY in the late 1950's and I'm faculty at a state university. Tales of impropriety certainly are of considerable interest to me. In Shreve's novel we see boarding school faculty (the headmaster and his wife, etc), students, parents, and others, all caught up in a scandal that the headmaster Bordwin had hoped could be handled in-house. Drinking, drugs, and sex (untaped sex, that is, not something taped and posted on YouTube) are commonplace and apparently are not taken very seriously by anyone. In my halcyon days, such as they were, at boarding school, drugs were "hippie stuff", smoking cigarettes in unauthorized places at unauthorized times resulted in suspension, and alcohol got you a permanent boot. The headmaster was an old English type, and you sometimes got the idea that caning had appeal for him, and that he wished caning were an option. If he had been headmaster at Avery Academy there would probably have been very few students left in the place.

As I read the story I found myself thinking that everyone--the headmaster, the older boys involved, the 14-year-old girl, the parents, the headmaster's wife--were exercising horrifyingly bad judgement. Avery Academy must have lawyers--any private school does, especially a boarding school, since a boarding school is in loco parentis. So the very first thing that a headmaster would do (or should do) is to run to the lawyers. This is not just a case of a student smoking a cigarette behind the gym--it's taped sex involving at least 5 people, including an underage girl. Any headmaster should worry that this could be a felony and would call the lawyers. A headmaster or faculty member would (or should) also seek the advice of veteran faculty. The same thing is true at the university level--you learn to seek advice. Not doing so puts you at severe risk (I've had colleagues who didn't seek advice and who were lucky not to have wound up in court, or worse).

The students involved are also culpable--but one doesn't expect them to use mature judgement. Nonetheless, engaging in filmed sex with a 14-year-old is idiotic. I asked "how could boys smart enough to get into a prestigious school be so dumb?", especially when we have the well-publicized case of a Georgia 18-year-old going to jail for videotaped sex with a (I believe) 16-year-old girl. The parents are not much better, and some are worse. So this was a book that had relevance for me, as a teacher. The basic storyline is interesting and well-told, but I found that I wasn't relating at all to the people involved. I kept hoping that the book would have a centerpoint--someone with good sound judgement who could comment intelligently on the situation--someone who could be at the other end of this moral see-saw--more like Straitley in Joanne Harris' fine novel Gentlemen and Players. Avery Academy must have its own Straitleys--older faculty members who've seen it all--people who Bordwin would immediately go to for help and advice. Such a person could have provided the novel with a life-saving rock before the waterfall, so to speak. You will not finish the novel joyfully--I don't think anyone seems hopeful at the end. It's a sad tale of destruction, self-destruction: relevant, and, I expect, all too common nowadays.

A million years ago, I wrote a piece for the New York Times Magazine about a murder at Yale. The victim, a privileged young woman, was a student there. So was her killer, a Mexican-American scholarship student from Los Angeles who killed her with a hammer to the head as she slept in the bedroom of the Westchester home of her Yale-educated father.

The article produced a firestorm of responses. I wasn't surprised. All parents, at some point, have to watch, unhappily, as a beloved child falls in love with someone who they think is seriously "unworthy". Every daughter has been in love with someone who just didn't cut it with the 'rents. And for every young buck who gets welcomed by his girlfriend's family, there must be a dozen who never feel accepted. So this article pressed everybody's buttons.

"Testimony", the 14th novel by Anita Shreve, will stir a similar response. The engine of the plot is a night gone wrong at a Vermont prep school --- older boys, a younger girl, plenty of alcohol and a video camera. And you know how teenagers are. It isn't just Mike Bordwin, the headmaster, who gets a copy of the tape. Some kid with no sense of the legal problems confronting the school and those boys and that girl slaps the thing up on the Internet, so everybody can see the 14-year-old hottie having far too adult fun with three older boys.

This is not a moment that occurs often in boarding school --- at least not to the knowledge of the grown-ups. It's a test. Of savvy in a crisis, for sure. But even more, of character. And that's the great strength of a book that starts out smutty --- at the same time, Shreve announces that it's a study of morality:

"Three boys were in trouble, and a girl . . . well, presumably, if it did turn out to be a case of sexual assault, the trouble had already occurred to the girl, though the fallout for her might be endless."

"Mike got up off the floor and sat on the sofa while he loosened his tie and unbuttoned the top button of his shirt, as if increasing blood flow to the brain might help solve his problem. And it was then that the word 'containment' entered his mind. And with that word, moral, ethical, and political choices were made, though Mike would realize the implications of these only later, when it occurred to him that he might have chosen at that moment another word, such as 'revelation', say, or 'help'."

That's just the surface of the flawed thinking at work here. The frame of the book is an academic's study of this disaster, conducted sometime later. We hear from parents, boys, the so-called victim, her friends --- we get a detailed picture of a school, its staff and its clients.

And we get more. The headmaster is a good man, but he's just a man. Mike may not writhe in the alcohol-fueled heat of a dorm on Saturday night, but he has his own passions, and the woman he shares them with --- well, that's a big factor in the thriller aspect of the plot, and its tragic resolution.

"Testimony" could have been a disaster. It's tricky to write kids, trickier still to write teen sex without moralizing. But Anita Shreve, who's written masterful pop fiction for decades, avoids all the traps. She presents young love and she presents young lust, and she has a cool eye for where they overlap. Even better, she has a real appreciation of how moral kids can be and how deeply they're aware when they screw up.

In the end, she leaves you with lots of questions. Was this all about alcohol, as one mother suggests? Was this a small story, blown out of all proportion by reporters intent on Pulitzers? Was the real problem the cover-up, not the crime? Was the real culprit a girl "who was hungry and knew how to make us hungry", as one boy put it? And can incidents like this really be prevented with "ten chaperones at every dance.... and security cameras mounted on trees"?

Anita Shreve makes a handful of kids at Avery Academy as real as kids you may know --- as real as your kids. And she makes lust as common and dangerous as the lust that surrounds us all --- as real as our lust. This book is, by design, a page-turner; you'll whip through it in an evening. But by refusing to provide glib moral answers, Shreve gives us a page-turner with a difference --- a page-turner that implicates us and makes us think.

First I must state a disclaimer about that review title: I work with privileged teenagers and therefore the plot of 'Testimony' was not only not shocking to me, it was fairly pedestrian. Right away my opinion of the work was tainted by my attitude about the story. It was difficult for me to work up the sense of outrage and horror that all the characters within the story seemed to have about the situation. Teenagers doing something dumb without thought of the repercussions? Wow, shocker.

What became more peculiar to me as the book went on were those very repercussions. I felt, upon concluding the book, that the whole endeavor smacked of an earlier era instead of having taken place in 2006. There is no way that a minor sex scandal would shut down an entire prep school in this day and age. The amount of illicit activities that go on at private schools in America might shock somebody with his or her head in the sand, but it certainly wouldn't bring down a board of trustees with a death grip on a wealthy foundation. For those readers offended by my use of the phrase 'minor sex scandal', well...unfortunately, Shreve has described just that. I kept waiting for the activities described on the tape to spiral into something horrific that warranted the subsequent events, but...nope. Just an underage girl having sex. With one boy. Sad, yes; statutory rape, yes; but the author has given it such moral ambiguity that it's difficult to get angry on behalf of the girl, even just to stand by the justness of the law. The Duke lacrosse team scandal was far more egregious and even the reality of that situation didn't exactly take Duke University off the map. It seems callous for me to take this attitude, but sadly, exposure to such truisms has jaded me.

By the time one character's truly tragic end comes about, I couldn't quite believe it. It felt more like a Bronte turn of plot than something a hung-over and upset teenager would do nowadays. Resort to violence as lashing out? That would make more sense. But as Shreve describes it, the Gothic machinations of the character play out as unwarranted. There's no precedent, either in the story or the arc of the character itself, for what happens. Sloppy!

I think Shreve is a skilled, controlled writer. I dug 'The Pilot's Wife' for its original story and clean writing. However, in 'Testimony', I felt we got bloodless prose. I was mainly held at arm's length, except for a few touching passages between Silas and his sweet girlfriend Noelle. If this relationship was meant to be the core of the story, great; but as it was, it was only one of a number of relationships that didn't grab me at all.