Books |
Testimony
Anita Shreve
By
Published: Jan 01, 2008
Category:
Fiction
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 boy 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. Every parent, at some point, has to watch, unhappily, as a beloved child falls in love with someone who’s 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 giving head to one guy and doing it with another and then letting a third boy orgasm on her chin and chest.
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 orgy, 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.
To buy “Testimony” from Amazon.com, click here.
