For a good part of the book, it seems that Anita Shreve's way around this problem is to break the story up into dozens of bite-sized portions, so we have no opportunity to see how little there is to be said about the lives of her young characters.
We get the points of view of everyone involved directly or tangentially - the four teenagers themselves, the man who sold them alcohol, the parents of the teenagers, the policeman called to investigate, a boy who is on the basketball team with the three accused. All these testimonies are being brought together by a researcher from the University of Vermont.
At a certain point, it gets hard to ignore the feeling that we are getting more pages but no more insight.
But Shreve knows how to hook your attention just when it starts drifting away. There are two questions that lurk beneath the surface for the first part of the story, keeping us compelled: who dies, and who was the fifth person in the room taping events?
As the answer to the first question becomes evident, and the second starts to fall out of focus, the story takes a turn, drawing in the lives of adults who are indirectly culpable for what transpired.
The story shifts from the tragedy of a teenager's death to the horror of those adults who are left consumed by guilt. The fractured narrative which earlier had considerable success in keeping the pace moving now seems a distraction. By two-thirds of the way through the book, there are four or five characters at the centre of the emotional drama - all the other voices dilute the power of their story.
Testimony is built on the premise that there is nothing wrong with three older boys - one above 18 - having sex with a 14-year-old girl. It's inadvisable and foolish, the book tells us, but the real problem is the discovery of the act.
To ensure we don't think of the 14-year-old girl as a victim (which would be a problem for the sympathetic portrayal of two of the older boys), Shreve paints her as the provocateur. She brings home the point that such girls do exist, tempting boys who otherwise wouldn't consider such acts, by bringing in another early adolescent girl who goes around "snaring" older boys.
There is no denying that there are 14-year-olds who think it a badge of honour to be sexually noticed; yet this book, so sympathetic and sensitive to the 17-year-old boys, has little interest in the sadness of a girl who sees her self-worth in terms of sexual desirability alone, and whose precociousness is not matched by her emotional maturity.
Testimony is a page-turner, its language crisp and uncluttered. But its emotional manipulations are so transparent that when it ends what remains is not catharsis, just relief that it's over
