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Testimony (2008)

by Anita Shreve(Favorite Author)

3.51 of 5 Votes: 2

ISBN

0316059862 (ISBN13: 9780316059862)

languge

English

genre

Fiction

publisher

Little, Brown and Company

review 1: Unless we're intimately involved in a scandal or other newsworthy event, we don't realize the ramifications that ripple out from the center. How many lives are affected? How many lives are forever changed? Not just those intimately involved, but even those lives on the periphery.Anita Shreve explores what happens to a community in the wake of a prep school sex scandal. She tells this story through the voices of those involved, under the guise that most of them are speaking to an unseen and unheard university professor researching the impact of alcohol on adolescent male behavior. I enjoyed the multiple perspectives. Shreve did a good job differentiating the voices. I could clearly hear the voice of a high school girl, a high school boy, a parent, a headmaster, etc.Most of ... morethe chapters are quite short, and the perspectives alternate and come back around. Some people we hear from quite a bit, others get only a chapter or two. The ones who get only a couple of chapters are more on the periphery of the scandal, while the ones we hear from the most are at the core of the story.The stories are a mix of first person, second person, and third person. Some are as told to the researcher, but others are not. The shifting perspectives and figuring out who is telling their story to the researcher was a little confusing. I also got a little lost in time. Some are recounting the fallout as it happened, while others are months removed and looking back on it.About two-thirds of the way through the book, information revealed becomes more tense and new facts are revealed. I hurried through the last part of the book, completely captivated by this time.This book nicely explores human behavior and the concept of blame. It's a difficult book, because the girl at the center of the scandal is not likable. She's manipulative and quite smart. Readers may feel some sympathy for the boys involved, which is completely at odds with how we tend to view these situations. But life is complicated; why can't situations like this be complicated, too? I liked the bigger theoretical and ethical questions this book revealed.
review 2: I enjoyed this book. It’s the first of Shreve’s books that I’ve read cover to cover and, in my opinion, serves as a real example of fluid writing talent.This book has been in my ‘to-read’ collection for the best part of two years and has taken me just a day to read. With a quick check on Goodreads, it surprises me that some of the reviews are a bit lame for this read whereas I liked it hugely.Point taken that the narrative tackles a difficult and explicit subject head first and Shreve is quite graphic in her primary description of what is essentially an orgy with three participating males and one younger female within the dorms of a New England boarding school. Propelling all future narrative, Shreve chooses this blunt platform from which to launch a very multi-layered and multi-perspective narrative texture that deals with the background, fallout and subsequent breakdowns and catastrophes caused by those few moments of madness. In my opinion though, the clever reader will be able to decipher other subtexts behind the ‘pinnacle moment’ that cause equal if not more unravelling to the tale. Sorry but being more specific would be revealing a spoiler.The characters in the book seem quite distant and I don’t feel that apart from Robert Leicht (who still remains quite a neutral character even whilst penning a ‘summative’ letter) we ever get to know a personality in full. This however is not a criticism as it’s possibly because of the explorative and quick-paced witness narrative that we are purposefully not presented with ‘whole’ characters. It does, in fact, seem like Shreve wants us to work out the characters and backgrounds if we can join the dots on her basic sketched layout. Personally, I think that this characterisation game is excellent and, working in line with the plot, the reader is fully permitted to make their own assumptions, ask and answer questions and, very much positively, develop their reading between the lines possibly even pre-empting future plot with a thriller beat.I do feel a bit naïve whilst concluding my review that I have not read more of this prolific writer Shreve. That said, I enjoyed this one for the mastery in characterisation and for the author’s actually allowing of the reader to make decisions as to what is ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ according to their own moral compass, life experience, hindsight and understanding of youth (and all that goes within the latter banner).A great book to read and analyse. It would be a perfect book-club book and would surely promote interesting debate from many different perspectives. less

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