Testimony
By Anita Shreve
Little Brown, $38.99

Reviewed by Nicky Pellegrino in the Herald on Sunday, 7 December 2008, and reproduced her with her permission.

Anita Shreve has written 14 novels and has tended not to be consistent in either tone or style. Of the ones I’ve read, I’ve loved two, a couple have been forgettable and one I’ve hurled across the room in sheer exasperation.

Testimony is interesting because it reads as though Shreve steeped herself in Jodi Picoult novels before she started writing it. The book uses that author’s familiar technique of a central issue and a chorus of voices telling the story.
It opens as the headmaster of a private school in Vermont uncovers a sex scandal involving four of his pupils. Three boys and an under-age girl, a drunken party and a video camera spell disaster, not just for the pupils, but everyone linked to them.

Shreve gives each character their say: the boys, their parents, a girlfriend, another pupil, the reporter who breaks the story, the under-age girl, a cop, even the guy who sold the kids alcohol in the first place and a woman who works in the school dining hall. It could be confusing hearing so many points of view but actually it’s fascinating to follow the shifts in perception, to see the way one event changes the course of so many lives and explore every facet of the scandal.

Inevitably in a book with such a crowded cast, many of the characters are lightly sketched and most of them are also really awful. The under-age girl, for example, is a complete slut, the headmaster is pompous and self-interested as are most in the story. Only a few characters are sympathetically drawn and it’s for them Shreve reserves the greatest share of guilt and tragedy.
This book doesn’t have the lyrical quality of Fortune’s Rocks or the grabby plotline of The Pilot’s Wife but it’s a well-paced story with Shreve delivering enough of a twist in the tale to keep the reader hooked. It’s not a comfortable read, particularly if you happen to be the parent of an adolescent, as it exposes how easily they can be thrown off course, how little it takes to sour a life. In many ways it’s a fiercely moralistic tale showing as it does how hormonal teenage urges and more adult passions can be equally ruinous.
Heartbreaking in parts, reading Testimony has a car crash quality - it’s shocking, upsetting and yet somehow impossible to look away.

Review by New Zealand novelist Nicky Pellegrino whose new novel, The Italian Wedding, is being published by Hachette in April 2009.

FOOTNOTE: The Bookman has also just read TESTIMONY and I must say I agree with Nicky's description - shocking, upsetting and yet somehow impossible to look away. Shreve's description of the impact of this comparatively innocuous act of teenagers messing about with sex while drunk, all consensual, is wonderfully developed and the tragic impact on so many lives is believably and movingly portrayed. And as an aside, what a stunning cover.

Hachette Liver (Little Brown) obviously have high hopes for thius title as I notice it is currently being advertised on Prime TV.