THE Westville bookstore was buzzing with expectation as Anita Shreve fans braved the inclement weather to meet their favourite author and have her autograph a copy of her latest novels for them.

I had been asked to host Shreve at Exclusive Books at
the Pavilion and I was just a tad nervous. Not known for
happy endings and known for her rather dark novels, I
wasn’t sure what to expect of the person, Anita Shreve.

Was she as dark and serious as her novels? How do you approach someone like that?

But I was soon at ease and realised that despite the dark
subject matter that she deals with, she is in fact extremely accessible, easygoing and a pleasure to talk to.

Shreve grew up in Dedham, Massachusetts in the US. After graduating from university, she taught high school for a number of years in and around Boston. She quit to start writing after she “had this panicky sensation that it was now or never”.

Those early days were marked with rejection upon
rejection, and according to Shreve on her website, she
could have wallpapered her bathroom with those
rejections of her short stories from magazines.

One of her short stories published in a literary journal
did, however, fetch her the O Henry prize. But she soon learned that she couldn’t make a living out of writing short stories in America. So she turned to journalism, which she did for 15 years.

Shreve moved to Nairobi, Kenya, where she worked as a
journalist for an African magazine for three years from
1975 to 1978.

She returned to the US and continued as a writer and editor on a number of magazines in New York. In this time she also married and started a family. She has two children and three stepchildren.

Shreve never forgot her burning desire to write fiction, so while writing a non-fiction novel she also started her first novel, Eden Close.

Despite being discouraged by her editor, she persevered
and in 1989 published Eden Close, which earned her a
modest income.

The rest, as they say, is history. Shreve’s successes
since have been phenomenal:


In 1998, she received two awards for her fiction.


In 1999 The Pilot’s Wife became the 25th selection of Oprah’s Book Club and an international bestseller.


In April 2002, CBS aired the film version of The Pilot’s Wife.


In 2002, The Weight of Water, starring Elizabeth
Hurley and Sean Penn, was released in movie theatres.


This year, her novel, Testimony, was shortlisted for
the Exclusive Books Boeke prize and she is extremely
honoured and excited about it.

While Shreve is pragmatic and sees her writing as a job,
she also admits to having an overall mission in her work – to unlock the secrets of the human heart. All of her
novels centre around this theme in different ways.

Shreve is fascinated by human relationships and in both A Change in Altitude and Testimony she explores the
consequences of a single reckless or pivotal moment in
the lives of her characters and how this can change their
lives forever.

In Testimony that pivotal moment is a night of drinking
and sex at a private school. In A Change in Altitude it is the attentions of a married man on a married woman.

According to Shreve, A Change in Altitude is loosely
based on her own experiences in Kenya – she did climb
Mount Kenya, she did work in media.

But she is also at pains to point out that she is not
Margaret – the central character of the novel. The
novel is definitely a separate entity with a life of its own.

“You have to step back and blur the textures, blur the
experience you have,” says Shreve. “If you don’t you will not be able to trigger the imagination. And if you
aren’t able to trigger the imagination your characters
will be stillborn.

“If you cannot step back there will be some muddy
compromise between what was real and what was
fiction.”

In this novel, Shreve explores the textures of a new
marriage. Americans Margaret and Patrick are married barely three months and move to Kenya so that Patrick can research and work as a doctor.

It is a culture shock they were obviously not prepared
for and suddenly their marriage is put to the test.

Befriended by a couple, they undertake to climb Mount Kenya. While on the mountain tragedy strikes and this changes everyone’s life forever.

The rest of the novel looks at how the various characters, Margaret in particular, deals with the tragedy.

While it is evident that the tragedy impacts on a number
of people, Margaret is the one most affected by it. Everyone blames her for the incident and she herself feels a guilt that she cannot come to grips with.

For Shreve the interesting question is about trust,
betrayal and guilt. As a reader we have to question whether this marriage would have been tested the way it was, whether it would have survived, had they remained in the US.

And in true Shreve form, there is no answer to these
questions at the end of the novel.

In Testimony, one reckless night has tragic consequences
for many characters in the novel, but also for people not
mentioned in the novel.

A videotape lands on a headmaster’s desk. More shocking than the sexual acts recorded on the tape are the ages of the pupils. One girl is just fourteen.

The tape unleashes a storm of shame and recrimination
throughout the small community. In a series of testimonies the characters involved in the scandal speak
out to relate the events of that night and their aftermath.

The videotape provokes more questions than answers.

How could this have happened? Who is to blame? Will the mistakes of one foolish moment ruin the futures of everyone involved?

As the various testimonies come together to reveal the
truth about the events of that fateful night, the reader is left with a profound sense of despair at how the lives
touched by these events have been forever transformed.

Shreve use the “testimony style” to give her readers a
sense of authenticity to what each character was thinking and feeling about this incident.

Only a mother can say how she feels to hear her son is
going to be charged with statutory rape. Only the young
girl can say what possessed her to get involved in the
incident. Only the headmaster can tell us how he tried to
contain the fallout but failed.

It is also a deeply unsettling technique that left me feeling completely bewildered and hopeless in the end.

But Shreve is adamant that real life is not about happy
and neat endings. A single action can have devastating
and far-reaching effects that people sometimes will never recover from.

And that is what her novels are essentially about.