Testimony Anita Shreve Little, Brown, 320pp, £14.99

Small-town scandal

Anita Shreve is a phenomenon. A bestselling author of literary fiction and former Oprah Book Club pick, she is also a feminist who has written an acclaimed study of the women's consciousness movement of the late Eighties. Testimony is her 14th novel. It is about a scandal at a private school in a small town in Vermont. It opens with the discovery by the headmaster of a videotape in which three seniors are seen having sex or performing sex acts upon a 14-year-old girl. All have been drinking to excess. The girl may or may not have been a willing participant. The headmaster acts slowly and without conviction in an attempt to defuse the situation and salvage what he can of the school's reputation and, by extension, his career prospects. His hapless moral vacillations make a bad situation intolerable. Some of the participants are driven by his complicity in the escalation of the affair to extreme acts of emotional violence. Tragedy ensues.

As ever - and even though the novel is written from different points of view - the power of Shreve's writing lies in its relentless passivity. The prose is undemonstrative, yet insidiously accomplished.

Everywhere you look in Testimony, everything is in pieces. America is broken

On the odd occasions that she lets herself go, the result is also more effective than some critics would have us believe possible. Here is a young man talking of a love he goes on to lose, and it is a beautifully judged sentence:

"You moved your arms just ever so slightly, as if you might dance or twirl with the spring inside you, and I felt it, too, and I fell in love with you that day, and you never even knew."

For all the similarities to her previous work, however, this is Shreve's bleakest novel yet. Early on, she writes that "the trees around Avery were yellow and red maple that let in the light in summer and turned pink and gold in the autumn" and you read it as a piece of typical Shreve-ian lyricism. Later she writes that "that afternoon, I waited for him watching the low sun turn the fields pink, making a sharp silhouette of the mountains against the navy sky", and for an instant the description of pink fields conjures instead the lurid hypersentimentality of a landscape by Thomas Kinkade.

It would come as no surprise if Shreve intended this effect as a counterpoint to bring into sharp relief the story she is telling. Because she is telling us that this America of the rosy glow is a fantasy: "I will argue that the press created a monster," laments a journalist covering the story, salaciously. "Or the public did. Or, really, the school itself did. One can argue blame indefinitely on this one." Alcohol is clearly a factor. "The abuse of alcohol was impossible to stop and was at the top of the list of worries for nearly every headmaster or principal of every secondary school in the country."

Then there are the other, unlikely targets of Shreve's invective. The "motives" of a woman who commits adultery are equated with those of one of the youths involved in the scandal. Most tellingly, for an author who wrote nearly 20 years ago of the benefits of feminist consciousness-raising beginning to "pervade the culture", the girl at the centre of the incident is almost entirely unsympathetic. She is culpable, responsible even, for what happened.

Everywhere you look in Testimony, everything is in pieces. America, Shreve seems to be saying, is broken. Worse, there is the sense that no one knows why, or even if there is a "why" to be known. "It was an act without a why," claims one of the youths involved. This is an unabashedly depressing view of American society.

For some, it may be reassuring that an author who can command a readership as large as Shreve's should choose to write a novel of this sort. On the surface, it is a brave, uncompromising choice for someone occasionally criticised as being a "women's writer". Yet I think that Testimony goes further than this. It is so unforgiving of a panoply of human frailty as to be misanthropic. And while misanthropy can be cathartic, funny and true, it is also a cop-out. Despite her clear-eyed excoriation of the platitudes that define relationships between men and women and characterise our relationship with the fictions of the American dream, Shreve's writing in Testimony is not about the sense that we can make things better. Rather, it is a typically postmodern response to the state we're in, in which all we can do is throw our hands up in despair and concede that the culture is as the culture does, even as we are all diminished by it. What will be, she is saying, will be. It is, I would suggest, a deeply conservative book.

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