Book review Testimony by Anita Shreve or “let’s go to the video tape…”

There’s an American sports journalist (? commentator?) called Warner Wolf, and one of his catchphrases was “let’s go to the video tape.”

It came to mind while I was reading this rather good novel by the late Anita Shreve. The novel is told in mosaic format – chapters told by characters (central and peripheral) before, during and as much as two years after An Event. The event in question is a sex scandal – three athletes and a younger, entirely willing but legally (and morally) unable to consent girl. The graphic details of it are communicated through the eyes of the headmaster of the private school where it happened, as he watches a video tape (the identty f the camera operator is nicely dealt with near the end). From there we are off to the races with a skilfully drawn set of consequences for the boys, their parents, their friends, staff at the school, townsfolk and so on.

Shreve is particularly good on the stories we tell ourselves, the bits we leave out, and the way the mass media can amplify a shituation, and take it from something that might be one thing, but becomes something entirely else….

Some quotes observations from the journalist who “breaks” the story and turns it into a national scandal, are particularly nicely done –

So I ask him the victim’s name, and he says, No comment, again, but he’s pretty ticked off now, because I should know that he can’t give me the victim’s name, which , of course, I do know. but you see, not all questions are asked to elicit answers. Most of them are to get the person on the other line to talk to say words, one or two of which are going to be revealing or cause a spark that sends you in a certain direction. (Shreve, 2009: 155)

and the same character, much later

CNN got the first raw footage of the tape and though they couldn’t show much – the faces and all the body parts had to be grayed out – they made a big deal about the ethics of airing the clip in that nauseating, self-congratulatory way that the cables and the networks do. “We’re going to show this, even though we’ve spent all day debating the ethics of doing so, because we feel it’s i the best interest of our viewing audience.” What a load of bull (Shreve, 2009: 232).

I’d only read one other Shreve before now (The Pilot’s Wife, which was mid) and I think I’d unfairly put her in the same box as the execrable Jodi Picoult. Shreve isn’t quite Carol Shields or Alison Lurie, but then, who among us is?

Verdict: solid, page-turner and intermittently thought-provoking.