Reading Matters

'Testimony' by Anita Shreve

Fiction - hardcover; Little, Brown; 320  pages; 2008. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

Reading a new Anita Shreve novel is always a delicious experience, not least because she's an author with an uncanny ability to spin an entertaining story out of an often simple premise. But what I like most about this prolific American author is her refusal to stick to a formula. While her novels may share similar themes -- usually love, loss and family relationships in a New England setting -- she plays around with narrative structure so no two books are alike.

In her latest, Testimony, she tells the story of a sex scandal at a private school in Vermont from the viewpoint of some 24 different characters. It sounds crazy to have so many voices in the mix, but somehow, in Shreve's capable hands, the structure works without losing any narrative drive. But given the story is such a cracking one it would be almost impossible not to convey a sense of urgency and excitement in the telling of it.

The book opens with Mike Bordwin, the headmaster of Avery Academy, watching a video given to him by one of his administrative staff. The footage shows three male students from the school's basketball team having drunken sex with a much younger pupil. While Mike is shocked and repulsed, he is also desperate to contain the outfall so that it does not tarnish the school's sterling reputation. But we, the readers, are told at the outset that the explicit video produces ...

 ... something very like radiation sickness throughout the school, reducing the value of an Avery education, destroying at least two marriages [...], ruining the futures of three students, and, most horrifying of all, resulting in a death.

As Mike launches an in-house investigation and gets at least two of the culprits -- the upstanding Rob Leicht and the less likable "ringleader" James Robles -- to sign written confessions, the girl's outraged parents call the police. Meanwhile the third culprit, Silas Quinney, a promising scholarship student with a talent for basketball, goes missing.

When a local newspaper reporter gets wind of the unfortunate events, Avery Academy suddenly attracts the kinds of unsavoury headlines that destroy reputations and ruin lives.

But, as ever with a Shreve novel, everything is not quite what it might seem. A steady drip, drip of information, delivered by different characters -- including some of the parents, other teachers, the students involved and police -- allows the reader to build up a picture of what really happened that fateful night. There are certain revelations which occur late in the book that gave this reviewer at least pause for thought. (As an aside, I'd caution you against reading the product description on Amazon.co.uk because it gives away some of these crucial plot spoilers -- thankfully I read it after I'd finished the book.)

While Testimony doesn't attempt to draw any moral conclusion about the scandal, nor does it attribute blame to any one party, it does throw up some interesting questions about the sexual conduct of teenagers (or, as one character puts it, "I thought it odd that no one at school thought to mention to any student that it was actually illegal in the state of Vermont for a senior boy to have intercourse with a freshman girl") and underage drinking. But it does show very clearly how "a single action can cause a life to veer off in a direction it was never meant to go" .

The social issues here, while important, aren't examined in any great detail, because the author is more interested in analysing how ordinary people react when thrust into extraordinary situations. For that reason alone, Anita Shreve fans will find much to like in this book and, if you're anything like me, you'll race through it in a day or two, desperate to find out what happens in the end.

'Body Surfing' by Anita Shreve

 

Fiction - hardcover; Little, Brown; 304 pages; 2007.

When this advanced readers' copy of Anita Shreve's soon-to-be-published Body Surfing thudded through my mail box (courtesy of a blog friend and not the publisher) I was -- to be perfectly frank -- just a little excited. Long-time readers of this blog will know that I am a Shreve fan. Not only does this American author produce quality fiction, she's not afraid to experiment and go off in different directions without losing the very essence of what makes her a great writer: she knows how to spin an entertaining, often emotional, yarn without sacrificing plot or character.

Body Surfing is a welcome return to form after the disappointment of her previous novel, A Wedding in December, in which the pacing was thrown off kilter by two narratives that did not particularly compliment one another.

But in this latest addition to Shreve's ever-expanding body of work (this is her 13th novel) the author has ditched her preference for dual narratives and stuck to one simple, and very solid, storyline.

Set on the New Hampshire coast (a favourite, if somewhat predictable, Shreve setting) over the space of three years, Body Surfing is told through the eyes of 29-year-old Sydney, who has already been once divorced and once widowed. In a seaside cottage (the same one that features in The Pilot's Wife and Sea Glass) owned by the well-heeled Mr and Mrs Edwards she takes a summer job as a tutor to their "slow" 18-year-old daughter, Julie.

When the Edwards' two 30-something sons, Ben and Jeff, drop by for a weekend escape, Sydney feels that she has upset the family's equilibrium. Is she a maid, a tutor or a friend? She suspects that both sons have romantic feelings for her, but because she is still grieving for her second husband, she is not particularly keen on pursuing a third marriage... or is she?

To say anything else would spoil the twists and turns and unexpected heart-in-the-mouth surprises that this book dishes up. As ever, the language is smooth and lyrical, although I tend to think Shreve is a little heavy-handed when it comes to sub-clauses -- she has a penchant for riddling her sentences with them.

But this, fortunately, does not detract from the story, nor the wonderful characterisation, and the extraordinary feel of time and place that Body Surfing evokes. Fans of Shreve's work will not be disappointed with this one, and I rather suspect that she will acquire a whole host of new ones to boot.

Body Surfing will be published on March 29 in the UK and April 24 in the US.

Other Anita Shreve books reviewed here include: A Wedding in December, The Weight of Water, Light on Snow, Eden Close, All He Ever Wanted, Strange Fits of Passion, Where or When and Sea Glass.

'Where or When' by Anita Shreve

 Fiction - paperback; Abacus; 242 pages; 1993.

Charles Callahan, a real estate agent and insurance salesman, is married with three children. One day he chances upon a newspaper advertisement for a new poetry book, which is accompanied by a photograph of the author. Charles is immediately transported back to another time and place, for he once had a summer romance with the author -- Siân Richards -- when the pair were on a Catholic camp as carefree, young 14-year-olds, but lost contact with her afterwards.

With a recession biting and the bank about to foreclose on his Rhode Island house, Charles decides to risk his marriage and stable family life too by getting in touch with Siân, whom he has not seen in 31 years.

He re-establishes contact through an exchange of letters, which soon veer from innocent communication into more dangerous territory. When the pair meet at the site of the original camp of their youth -- now converted into a remote but posh hotel -- they embark on an illicit affair, which has tragic consequences.

In anyone else's hands this story would have become a soppy romance novel. But Shreve, an accomplished writer who knows how to tread the difficult line between trash and treasure without going overboard, has crafted a fine book about love, loss, passion and desire.

By contrasting the minutiae of daily working and family life with the excitement of a forbidden love, Shreve is able to create a realistic portrait of a man on the brink of his own ruin. She also works in Siân's side of the story in a series of alternating chapters written in first person, while the couple's summer romance from their teenage past is conveyed in a number of short, but illuminating, passages. These individual narratives work together to form a convincing and cohesive whole.

The story poses many moral questions -- for example, is it worth chasing happiness at any cost?-- but ultimately it's a straightforward tale, with a powerful ending, about rekindling a long-lost love.

Other Anita Shreve books reviewed here include: A Wedding in December, The Weight of Water, Light on Snow, Eden Close, All He Ever Wanted, Strange Fits of Passion and Sea Glass.

'A Wedding in December' by Anita Shreve

Fiction - paperback; Abacus; 336 pages; 2006.

A group of college friends, many of whom have not seen each other for 27 years, gather for a wedding at an inn in the Berkshire Mountains of western Massachusetts.

This once tight circle of friends - Rob, an out-of-the-closet pianist; Harrison, a book publisher; Jerry, a burly businessman with a stuck-up wife; Agnes, an umarried history teacher tormented by a long-running love affair and writing a novel; Nora, the widowed owner of the inn; and the wedding couple, Bill and Bridget, who dated at school but then went on to marry other people - spend three days at the inn.

The ceremony, restricted to just this group of seven friends and one or two others, takes on a special significance because Bridget, the mother of a 15-year-old son, has breast cancer and isn't expected to live much beyond two years.

And if this doesn't sound melancholy enough there are other shadows hovering over this group of friends, including the death of Steven, a charamastic classmate, at a drunken highschool party all those years ago, and the tragic events of 9/11 just three months earlier.

Amid this somewhat downbeat atmosphere the party gets snowed in and, fueled by the ensuing claustrophobia, tension and too much alcohol, comes the spilling of sordid secrets from the past...

I had really wanted to love this book, having waited so long for its paperback release, but I have to say I found A Wedding in December disappointing. It felt too contrived, too stilted and too meandering. I am surprised I actually got beyond the first chapter it was so plodding and pedestrian.

I particularly disliked the way in which a dual story - about the Halifax explosion of 1917 in which more than 2,000 people died - was interspersed throughout the main narrative. Shreve is usually a dab hand at dual narratives, but this one felt clunky and overworked. While I understand that it was supposed to mirror the terrorist attack on the World Trade Centre I'm sure the profound nature of those events could have been handled differently - for instance, as dinner table discussion between the friends.

That said, the book isn't entirely terrible.

The characters are well drawn and you get a real sense of what they were like at school and what they are like now, 27 years later, having experienced the ups and downs and twists and turns of their own lives.

Shreve also knows how to handle human emotions and is very good at exploring the ebbs and flows of people's lives. If nothing else, A Wedding in December is an interesting look at how our actions and our decisions can have far-reaching repercussions and that it is never too late to seek redemption or find happiness.

Other Anita Shreve books reviewed here include: The Weight of Water, Light on Snow, Eden Close, All He Ever Wanted, Strange Fits of Passion and Sea Glass.

'The Weight of Water' by Anita Shreve

Fiction - paperback; Abacus; 248 pages; 2005.

Jean, a photojournalist, takes her husband Thomas, a struggling poet, and young daughter Billie on assignment with her to the New Hampshire coast.

They sail on an old boat captained by Thomas's younger brother, Rich, and Rich's new girlfriend, Adaline, towards the unusually named island of Smuttynose. Here, in 1873, two Norwegian immigrants were murdered. A third woman, Maren Hontvedt, escaped.

Jean's assignment is to photograph the bleak, now abandoned island for a magazine feature on the murders, for which a local man was later tried and executed.

Intrigued by the case, Jean goes slightly off brief and decides to do some research of her own. In a local museum she chances upon a sheaf of papers written by Maren Hontvedt that reveal exactly what happened...

Shreve has crafted a beautifully written suspense novel, combining two narratives into one seamless story.

The first narrative, not necessarily the main one, is Maren's, which is composed through a series of extraordinary letters. These letters detail Maren's home life in Norway, her relationships with her siblings and her "accidental" marriage to a fisherman who whisked her away to a new life in America, where she endured much hardship and loneliness on Smuttynose Island.

When her two siblings also emigrate, the happy family reunion is thwarted by the claustrophobic confines of a small house on a windswept, treeless island, where money and comfort is in short supply. Through a series of misunderstandings and unfortunate incidents, the tension rises to that inevitable winter's night when Maren's sister and sister-in-law are brutally murdered.

The second narrative is Jean's. Like Maren, she is also a victim of circumstance, trapped in a disappointing marriage and plagued by petty jealousies and possessive behaviour. The more she researches Maren's story the more she realises that all is not as it seems - in her own life as much as Maren's.

Is her husband having an affair with the beguiling Adaline? Is he doing it on board the boat right under her nose? Or is the claustrophobic confines of the boat - and the island's dark history - making her paranoid?

As Jean's suspicions rise so too does her emotional paralysis, until an unexpected storm threatens to bring every little bit of flotsam and jetsam of her marriage to the surface - with devastating consequences.

Ultimately, this is another classic Shreve novel that grips from the first page. While the juxtaposition of both stories sometimes feels "clunky" the author more than makes up for this by delivering a well researched tale that packs not one but two surprise punches at the end.

Other Anita Shreve books reviewed here include: Light on Snow, Eden Close, All He Ever Wanted, Strange Fits of Passion and Sea Glass.

'Light on Snow' by Anita Shreve

Fiction - paperback; Abacus; 288 pages; 2005.

Twelve-year-old Nicky Dillon and her father are starting life anew in rural New Hampshire following a family tragedy. As both finally settle into familiar patterns and routines, an unexpected "find" one wintry day impinges on the natural order that they have worked so hard to achieve. When they stumble upon a newborn baby girl left abandoned in the woods little do they realise the maelstrom that is about to follow.

In Light On Snow Shreve focuses on her usual themes of love and loss. But she also explores family relationships, the responsibilities we have to one another through thick and thin, the fine line between happiness and despair, and the ties that bind us to people and places. Through the eyes of her female narrator we also get to glimpse the bond between a daughter and her grief-absorbed father, and, in turn, the loss felt by a young girl for her dead mother.

Shreve's language is always sparse and deceptively simple. But it's what's going on between the lines that really hits home. There is plenty of anger, misery, heartache and joy all bound up in just 288 big-print pages. But while it is an emotional book Shreve never resorts to melodrama or sentimentality. Her pitch, her tone, her balanced style is superb.

This is a lovely, heartfelt book. But I would expect nothing less of Shreve who has become one of my firm favourites in recent years. Other Shreve novels reviewed on Reading Matters include: Eden Close, All He Ever Wanted, Strange Fits of Passion and Sea Glass.

'Eden Close' by Anita Shreve

 

Fiction - paperback; Abacus; 265 pages; 1994.

This is a kind of sweet, simply told novel, the first by the prolific Anita Shreve, which explores the notion of love and loss.

It's about a man, Andrew, who returns to his childhood home after the death of his mother. As he packs up her things and makes plans to sell her home, he finds himself reminiscing about the past and reflecting on an horrific incident that still haunts him. He was only a teenager when his neighbour, Jim Close, was shot and killed in his home. Jim's daughter, Eden, Andrew's childhood companion, was blinded in the incident. Seventeen years on, Eden still lives at home with her elderly mother, but is shut off from the world with no friends and no life. Andrew tries to befriend her again and in doing so, begins to slowly chip away at the secrets Eden has kept all these years about the real truth of that murderous night in which her life was changed forever.

Shreve's languid prose adds to the claustrophobic atmosphere of life in small town America. But at times I felt the story was a little dull and slow-paced and tended to work over the same ground again and again. Despite this, the climax was unexpected and worth waiting for. Still, if you haven't read anything by Shreve before, I'm not sure this is the first place to start; her other novels are more accomplished.

'All He Ever Wanted' by Anita Shreve

Fiction - paperback; Abacus; 304 pages; 2003.

This was a surprisingly enjoyable book. I say surprising because as much as I have enjoyed Shreve's other novels, Sea Glass and Strange Fits of Passion, I found the opening chapter a little stodgy and wasn't quite sure whether I wanted to continue.

But I'm glad I persevered. Once I got used to the voice of the narrator, Nicholas Van Tassel, an English professor, who "speaks" in a pompous, sometimes convoluted, manner, I got swept away by the story.

Set in the late 19th and early 20th century it follows the relationship between Van Tassel and the love of his life, Etna Bliss, who agrees to marry him despite the fact she does not love him in return. Obviously this is not a match made in heaven but Van Tassel is blind or unwilling to acknowledge that all is not well.

While Etna plays the obedient wife and bears him two children, she also keeps a secret which threatens to destroy the marriage at a later date. It is when this secret becomes known that we see the obsessive jealousies and passions which have dominated Van Tassel's life; he will stoop to anything to hang onto his wife. Coupled with his ambitions to become dean at the college to which he has taught for most of his life, we see a desperate man reduced to desperate measures and it is not a pretty sight.

I thoroughly enjoyed this novel. It deals with big themes — love, honour, betrayal — with a deftness of touch. Shreve's writing is incredibly evocative of a past era; she captures the social mores of the time perfectly. She explores the inner workings of the human heart with equal aplomb.

Definitely a winning novel and a good, intriguing read for a wet and wintry day.

'Strange Fits of Passion' by Anita Shreve

Fiction - paperback; Abacus; 368 pages; 2002.

Shreve takes an old plot — a woman on the run from an abusive husband — and tells it in a fresh, engaging manner in this entertaining and moving novel. Told through the eyes of an investigative reporter, the story is built up as a series of "interviews" as she goes about her research for a magazine article on a crime committed by a young woman, Maureen English, some 20 years earlier. This lends the story a strange kind of authenticity, blending as it does the line between fiction and reportage. Shreve uses this to her advantage, rendering Strange Fits of Passion with an emotional impact that would be much less effective if told in a more traditional plot-driven way.

Through these "interviews" we learn that Maureen English, a young and impressionable rookie reporter, fell in love with a senior journalist with whom she later married. On the surface it looked like the perfect relationship, but Maureen soon realised that her new husband was a violent man with a raging temper. She decided to flee, taking their baby daughter with her. Moving to a small Maine fishing town, she rented an isolated house and tried to begin life anew under an assumed identity. As she settled into her new existence and fended off the prying townsfolk, Maureen began to feel the healing affect of time and distance. But then she discovered that the past has a strange way of catching up with the future . . .

All in all, Shreve has turned a predictable storyline on its head and given voice to the shame and agony of domestic violence in a highly original way. Quick to read, this is a superb novel to devour in bed or in front of the fire on a wet day.

'Sea Glass' by Anita Shreve

Fiction - paperback; Abacus; 368 pages; 2002.

This was the first book by Anita Shreve I've ever read. I wasn't sure what to expect; maybe something like a New England version of Maeve Binchy. (Not that Maeve Binchy is bad, mind, it's just that sometimes her novels are cloying, overly sentimental and hackneyed, and you have to be in the right mood to read them.) I was surprised, then, to find that this book was not only enjoyable and thoroughly readable, but it was also quite well-researched, and, dare I say it, literary.

It's set in 1929, a short time before the huge stock market crash which plunged America and, indeed, the rest of the world, into a gut-wrenching economic depression. A young bride, Honora, makes a home in an abandoned house by the sea with her new husband, Sexton, a travelling typewriter salesman. At first things are, if not idyllic, then at least happy and reasonably comfortable. But the first flush of love soon dissipates when Sexton loses his job and takes up a lowly-paid position at a nearby woollen mill, where conditions are difficult and dangerous. When the workers retaliate by taking industrial action (unheard of at the time), Honora, provides support, shelter and food for those involved in the strike, while her marriage slowly crumbles around her.

It's a simple tale but it's very well told. There's an emotional resonance which can be difficult to achieve without resorting to cliche and stereotypes, something Shreve never does. Shreve also fills her novel with rich historical detail that makes the era come alive. And her characters, which take it in turn to tell their version of the story chapter by chapter, are sharply drawn and very believable. I found myself reading this book at a very fast rate of knots, wondering what was going to happen next. If the rest of Shreve's novels are as entertaining as this one, then she had definitely won a new fan. But which of her other eight or so novels to read next . . . ?