Feb 09 2009
Testimony
Testimony was my first foray into the fiction of Anita Shreve, and I can see why she has such a following. She is an intense writer willing to tackle some of the most difficult issues faced by society. Because I have no previous knowledge of her work, I don’t know if the use of a variety of points-of-view is typical of her style, but she uses it deftly in this novel.
The following review will reveal some minor plot spoilers. Consider yourself warned.
Avery Academy is a boarding school in Vermont that caters to the sons and daughters of the upper class. While the school also has its token scholarship students and some day students from the nearby town of Avery, the majority of students are boarders. These are the students who are on the fast track to Yale, Harvard, Brown, and othe prestigious universities.
When headmaster Mike Gorwin is given a videotape that reveals four Avery students engaging in sexual activity in a dorm room, his world - and the world of the school - is turned upside down. The tape shows a freshman girl, who is 14 years old, engaging in sex of various types with three male students. Two are 18 years old and are seniors. One is a 19-year-old doing his post-graduate year before entering Gonzaga University on a basketball scholarship. All three young men are legally adults.
The ages of the students means that, in the legal sense, sexual assault has occurred. The fact that the tape shows the girl clearly enjoying herself, even smiling at the camera, doesn’t change that fact. As the headmaster tries to do damage control, he is hiding a secret of his own, a secret that explains why one of the male students was in the dorm room in the first place.
The story is told using various first person narrators, although the sections from Mike’s point of view are told in third-person, but limited to his own experiences and thoughts. It took me a few chapters to get used to this style, but I became accustomed to it, and think Shreve uses the technique well. Some chapters are from the point of view of students - either those involved or those on the perimeter. Others are told from the experience of the parents of the students, and those chapters were particularly hard to read.
I’m not sure that I can say I enjoyed this book, but it definitely made me think. I finished it on Friday, and it is still with me. Statutory rape (or sexual assault, as this particular crime is classified in Vermont) is a touchy subject. Legally, the young men were culpable for a crime, of which the young woman was the victim. But as I read the story of what happened, and the fact that the girl was extemely sexually precocious, I felt desperately sorry for the young men involved, and felt mostly disdain for her.
I know that realistically, any young woman who would seduce three older male students at once has some serious psychological issues and is probably coming from a troubled home life. Shreve does not go into details about the girl’s life, only the details of what she was involved in, and how once her involvement came to light, she tried to spin it into a situation of rape or being drugged in order to be taken advantage of. Because the young men’s academic careers were completely derailed - and for one student in particular, the consequences were much more devastating - I felt the most compassion and empathy for them and for their mothers.
Knowing how teenage boys are wired (and even though legally they were adults, they were still attending high school, still boys in my eyes), I think that the boy who would walk out of a room in which a beautiful young woman was doing a strip tease would be in the minority. As a mother of three sons, I hope and pray that my boys would have the moral fortitude to do exactly that.
I don’t want to make light of the fact that sexual assault and statutory rape are crimes. As a society, we have to have a line - an age of consent - that we draw to determine who is able to engage in sex willfully and with full knowledge. But I also think that when you have a high school where many seniors are 18, and are attending classes, dances, and other school functions with much younger students, that this makes it very likely that “adult” 18 year olds will be dating - and possibly engaging in sex with - younger students.
One of the signs of a well-written novel is that it sticks with you and makes you think, even makes you uncomfortable. Testimony does exactly that. Even though I didn’t find it a joyful read, it was definitely a book I’m glad to have spent time with.
Keep in mind that this book does include some sexual description of the incident in question. I believe it was necessary to impart the seriousness of what happened, and the shock felt by the adults who witnessed the tape.
4 out of 5 stars























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