There's a reason we love police procedurals and courtroom
dramas: they invite readers to plunge in, giving us a chance to
look at the evidence, hear the witnesses and guess at what it all
means. As the pieces accumulate, little by little a picture of the
truth --- or of a truth --- emerges. For nail-biting
tension, there’s nothing to beat this sort of slow,
tantalizing buildup.

Although TESTIMONY isn’t exactly a mystery, its author,
Anita Shreve --- a novelist so prolific that her consistency verges
on the miraculous --- is a master of suspense. Her work is
consistently fresh, intelligent and gripping, and she never fails
to be in control of her material, which in this instance concerns a
sexual assault case at the fictional Avery Academy, an upper-crust
prep school in Vermont. One night after a dance, three boys, star
basketball players, have sex with a 14-year-old girl. All four kids
are very drunk. And there is a videotape.

TESTIMONY consists of just that: not transcripts from a court of
law, but witness statements that dig into every nook and cranny of
the crime (if it was a crime). Each chapter is from a different
person’s perspective, ranging from Mike, the school’s
headmaster, to the perpetrators themselves, the girl in question
(it’s uncertain whether she is seductress or victim, or both)
and the beleaguered parents. Some pieces of evidence are in the
form of letters, others are personal reminiscences; several are
from interviews conducted a few years later by an academic
researcher investigating “alcohol and the adolescent
male.” Together, jigsaw-puzzle-like, these voices tell us the
story and its tragic denouement.

Although there are also accounts from more peripheral characters
--- policemen, roommates, teammates, a worker in the Avery dining
hall --- the students’ relationships with their parents, as
well as with quasi-parental figures like teachers or headmasters,
are the most central. I think that any parent reading it (most
likely a mother) will identify powerfully with the surprise and
shock of these adults as they confront the sex, drugs and lies of
their children’s double lives.

Two of the three boys, you see, have always seemed like
exemplary young men --- high morals, fine minds, all that --- so
their behavior is completely out of character. They ruin themselves
with one… what? Fit of anger and rebellion? Alcoholic frenzy?
Stupid mistake? It’s to Shreve’s credit that she
doesn’t sew her ending into a neatly stitched explanation or
indictment. Instead, efforts to contain the scandal vie with
attempts to expose it, and clarity is lost in a swirl of rage,
confusion and grief. Ambiguity is what TESTIMONY is all about.

Of the families, the one belonging to Silas, a local scholarship
boy, is the most interesting. His father is a farmer, plain-spoken
and radiating grim integrity (he never trusted Avery in the first
place); his mother yearns for something more
meaningful for herself and her son; and the boy himself is a
thoughtful kid, ethical almost to a fault. In love with Noelle, a
beautiful cellist, he is racked with self-loathing about what the
incident will mean to their future, fearful that she will forgive
him but never forget.

Some of the other characters are more clichéd --- the girl,
Sienna, is portrayed as a sleazy little opportunist who lacks
sensitivity or intelligence. But maybe Shreve is reminding us that
it isn’t just virtuous, reserved girls like Noelle who need
protection.

And it isn’t just jaded, amoral boys who take sexual
advantage. In fact, there is nothing in the novel to suggest,
reassuringly, that if teachers and parents paid attention and kids
were raised properly, incidents like this would never happen. In
that sense, Shreve’s book ends rather bleakly, for how can
institutions protect the innocent and nail the guilty when the line
between the two is so murky?

But TESTIMONY is as stimulating as it is sad. A fascinating
exercise in storytelling from multiple points of view --- with no
editorializing from a third-person narrator --- it makes witnesses
of its readers and challenges us to make up our own minds about
what is true or false, good or bad. A vigorous and provocative
book.