Testimony

By Anita Shreve



I am an Anita Shreve fan.

That being said, this book was far below par for Anita Shreve. I was sadly disappointed that I was unable to enjoy it more.

"Testimony" is about some students at Avery, a boarding school in Vermont, who make a tape of one girl engaged in various sex acts with three upper-classmen. Because of one decision made by two people, everyone's life results in a domino affect.

My biggest complaint with the book was that the author wrote each chapter (each varying greatly in length) from a different person's persepective. While this was bad enough, it could be possible to make it work if she hadn't then written each of those characters from a different point-of-view. When a book changes by chapter from first-person to third-person to second-person, it takes too long for the reader to get back into that character's frame of mind. While I have always admired the fact that Anita Shreve loves to employ new or different technniques, I cannot give her credit for this story, except to say that once again she had attempted to break the mold.

The first chapter is written about Mike Bordwin, the headmaster at the boarding school. Using third-person, it in itself grabs the reader's attention, giving a false sense of secuity in this being the beginning of a good book:

It was a small cassette, not much bigger than the palm of his hand, and when Mike thought about the terrible license and risk exhibited on the tape, as well as its resultant destructive power, it was as though the two-by-three plastic package had been radioactive. Which it may as well have been since it produced something very like radiation sickness throughout the school, reducing the value of an Avery education, destroying at least two marriages that he knew of, ruining the futures of three students, and, most horrifying of all, resulting in a death.

Chapter two is written from Ellen's perspective (one of the mom's of one of the students on the sex scandal tape), but from the second-person point-of-view. I felt like I was reading my daughters' "If You Give A Mouse a Cookie" book.

You wait for the call in the night. You've waited for years. You've imagined the voice at the other end, officious and male, always male. You hear the words, but you can't form the sentences. It's bad luck to form the sentences, so you skip to the moment when you're standing by the phone and you've already heard the news and you wonder: How will I behave?

Will you scream? It seems unlikely. You are not a screamer. You can't remember the last time you screamed out loud. Will you collapse then, knees buckling, holding onto the wall as you go down? Or will you, as you suspect, simply freeze, the paralysis immediate and absolute, likely to last for hours, because to move is to have to make a life after the phone call, and you can't possibly imagine how you will do that.

The third chapter is written from another character's perspective but is back to being told from a third-person point-of-view.

The fourth chapter is written from yet another character's perspective, this time in first-person. Sienna is the girl at the center of the sex-tape scandal; the reader knows immediately that she was not completely innocent in what happened:

I'm like, if anyone touches me, I'm going to kill them. I have no money left. Do you have a dollar? I need... There's nothing in here. Just a bunch of dimes and nickels. I changed my name. I thought it up myself. My name used to be something else, but I like Sienna better. I was traumatized. I had to be in therapy for ages. You can put your life behind you and get a new start. I haven't thought about what happened in Vermont in, like, I don't know. I was the victim. I think someday I'll write a book about it.

As I said before, I have enjoyed most all of Anita Shreve's books. Unfortunately, "Testimony" misses its mark.