Atom Egoyan's Oscar-nominated The Sweet Hereafter is a good movie, remarkably faithful to the spirit of Russell Banks's novel of the same name, but Banks's book is twice as good. With the cool logic of accreting snowflakes, his prose builds a world--a small U.S. town near Canada--and peoples it with four vivid, sensitive souls linked by a school-bus tragedy: the bus driver; the widowed Vietnam vet who was driving behind the bus, waving at his kids, when it went off the road; the perpetually peeved negligence lawyer who tries to shape the victims' heartaches into a winning case; and the beauty-queen cheerleader crippled by the crash, whose testimony will determine everyone's fate.

We experience the story from inside the heads of the four characters in turn--each knowing things the others don't, each misunderstanding the facts in his or her own way. The method resembles Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury and Gilbert Sorrentino's stunning Aberration of Starlight, but Banks's achievement is most comparable to John Updike's tales of ordinary small-towners preternaturally gifted with slangy eloquence, psychological insights, and alertness to life's tiniest details.

Egoyan's film is haunting but vague--it leaves viewers in the dark regarding several critical plot points. Banks's book is more haunting still, and precise, making every revelation count, with a finale far superior to that of the film. It's also wittier than the too-sober flick: the lawyer dismisses the dome-dwelling hippie parents of one of the crash victims as being "lost in their Zen Little Indians fantasy," which casts a sharp light on them and him, too. He's lost in his calculations of how each parent will fit into the legal system, and the ways in which he fits into the tragedy are lost on him. If only he and the Vietnam-vet dad could read each other's account of their tense first encounter, both of them might get what the other is missing. Banks's wit is pitiless--it's painful when we discover that the bus driver, who prides herself on interpreting for her stroke-impaired husband, is translating his wise but garbled observations all wrong. The crash turns out not to be the ultimate tragedy: in the cold northern light of its aftermath, we discover that we're all in this alone.


From Publishers Weekly
Banks employs a series of narrators to present a powerful account of an Adirondack community riven by a bus accident that claims 14 children. A Literary Guild alternate in cloth. Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
One snowy morning in the small town of Sam Dent in upstate New York, a school bus careens into a frozen stream, killing 14 children. The Sweet Hereafter examines the aftereffects of this accident through the eyes of four narrators: the driver of the bus, a parent devastated by the loss of two children, an opportunistic big-city lawyer, and a permanently crippled teenager who survived the crash. Grief and an obsessive need to assign blame draw the townspeople together; all too quickly the focus shifts from what they have lost to how much they stand to collect in insurance settlements. Banks, who along with Raymond Carver, Ernest Herbert, and a handful of other writers has revived the genre of working-class fiction in the last decade, is uncharacteristically heavy-handed in extracting a moral from these proceedings. Not up to the high standard set by Continental Drift ( LJ 4/15/85). Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 5/15/91.- Edward B. St. John, Loyola Law Sch. Lib., Los AngelesCopyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.


Richard Eder, Los Angeles Times Book Review
"A novel of compelling moral suspense...[a] superb book...a remarkable book, a sardonic and compassionate account of a community and its people."


Boston Globe
"Russell Banks's fiction holds such a simple, internal authority...The story he tells is grave and unusually urgent, his prose as careful as a trail of stones left in the forest...These voices ache with a particular brand of reality [and] Banks evokes each of his characters with fluid authenticity...Russell Banks is a writer of extraordinary power."


From Kirkus Reviews
Banks returns to the provincial reaches of upper New York State (Affliction, 1989), this time to see how a community tragedy touches the lives of ordinary people. It's an early morning like any other in the civic-minded small town of Sam Dent--until a school bus inexplicably swerves from the highway and plunges through the ice of a water-filled sandpit, killing a number of children and leaving at least one crippled for life. In a compact but standard telling of the tale through the voices of four of the people involved--the bus's female driver; a father who loses his two children; a teenaged girl who faces life in a wheelchair; a right-minded negligence lawyer from N.Y.C.-- Banks offers both the pleasures and the topicality-driven excesses of the hyperfamiliar. Though there are gripping moments here--the lawyer's long-ago memory of once rushing his infant daughter to the hospital, for example--the impact of much else is diminished by the feeling that characters are type-representatives first and people second. The bus driver is married to a stroke victim; the bereaved father of two is a Vietnam veteran and a cancer-widower; the teenaged girl stuck in a wheelchair is also victim of her father's seductions; the lawyer's grown daughter, hopelessly lost to drugs, turns out also to have AIDS. Leaving no topic untouched, as if pleading to become a TV movie, the story moves toward a divisive negligence trial--which is averted by a plot surprise that may or may not convince most readers but that's rendered in an impressively skillful deposition scene. Melodrama and populist realism in a Banksian mix that often rings tinny but that's easy reading and may have popular appeal. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.



"The Sweet Hereafter . . . is a close and haunting story of a small town in distress . . . unflinching and quietly powerful."



"This beautifully written book's most brilliant strategy is . . . to explore the complexity of grief and hope."


Chicago Tribune
"Without sentimentalizing them in the least, Banks has extended the themes explored in his previous novels...to show that wiser, possibly even better people can emerge from the ordeal: that some old American decencies still prevail, against all the odds."


Review
"Russell Banks' work presents without falsehood and with a tough affection the uncompromising moral voice of our time. You find the craziness of false dreams, the political inequalities and somehow the silver of redemption. I trust his portrait of America more than any other -- the burden of it, the need for it, the hell of it." -- Michael Ondaatje

"A writer of extraordinary power.... The story of Russell tells is grave and unusually urgent, his prose as careful as a trail of stones left in the forest... these voices ache with a particular brand of reality." -- The Boston Globe

"The characters are rendered with such clear-eyed affection, the central tragedy handled with such unsentimental artistry, the wonderfully named mountain hamlet of Sam Dent described in such precise (and often funny) detail, The Sweet Hereafter is not only Banks' most accomplished book to date, but his most accessible and ultimately affirmative. Russell Banks knows everything worth knowing... and much, much more." -- Washington Post Book World


Book Description
In The Sweet Hereafter, Russell Banks tells a story that begins with a school bus accident. Using four different narrators, Banks creates a small-town morality play that addresses one of life's most agonizing questions: when the worst thing happens, who do you blame?

FROM THE PUBLISHER

In The Sweet Hereafter, Russell Banks tells a story that begins with a school bus accident. Using four different narrators, Banks creates a small-town morality play that addresses one of life's most agonizing questions: when the worst thing happens, who do you blame?

Author Biography:

Russell Banks was raised in New Hampshire and eastern Massachusetts. The eldest of four children, he grew up in a working-class environment, which has played a major role in his writing.

Mr. Banks (who was the first in his family to go to college) attended Colgate University for less than a semester, and later graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Before he could support himself as a writer, he tried his hand at plumbing, and as a shoe salesman and window trimmer. More recently, he has taught at a number of colleges and universities, including Columbia University, Sarah Lawrence, University of New Hampshire, New England College, New York University and Princeton University.

A prolific writer of fiction, his titles include Searching for Survivors, Family Life, Hamilton Stark, The New World, The Book of Jamaica, Trailerpark, The Relation of My Imprisonment, Continental Drift, Success Stories, Affliction, The Sweet Hereafter, Rule of the Bone, and Cloudsplitter. He has also contributed poems, stories and essays to The Boston Globe Magazine, Vanity Fair, The New York Times Book Review, Esquire, Harper's, and many other publications.

His works have been widely translated and published in Europe and Asia. Two of his novels have been adapted for feature-length films, The Sweet Hereafter (directed by AtomGoyan, winner of the Grand Prix and International Critics Prize at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival) and Affliction (directed by Paul Schrader, starring Nick Nolte, Willem Dafoe, Sissy Spacek, and James Coburn). He is the screenwriter of a film adaptation of Continental Drift.

Mr. Banks has won numerous awards and prizes for his work, among them a Guggenheim Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships, Ingram Merrill Award, The St. Lawrence Award for Short Fiction, O. Henry and Best American Short Story Award, The John Dos Passos Award, and the Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Continental Drift and Cloudsplitter were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in 1986 and 1998 respectively. Affliction was short listed for both the PEN/Faulkner Fiction Prize and the Irish International Prize.

He has lived in a variety of places, from New England to Jamaica, which have contributed to the richness of his writing. He is currently living in upstate New York. The Angel On The Roof is his first collection of short stories in fifteen years.

Russell Banks is married to the poet Chase Twichell, and is the father of four grown daughters.

FROM THE CRITICS

Chicago Tribune

Without sentimentalizing them in the least, Banks has extended the themes explored in his previous novels . . . to show that wiser, possibly even better people can emerge from the ordeal: that some old American decencies still prevail, against all odds.

San Francisco Chronicle

Banks poses many questions, and his canvas is far larger than any thumbnail sketch of its components can suggest.

Vogue

This beautifully written book's most brilliant strategy is . . . to explore the complexity of grief and hope.

Michiko Kakutani

Mr. Banks . . . does a smoothly professional job of giving the reader a finely observed portrait of small town life . . . It's as though he has cast a large stone into a quiet pond, then minutely charted the shape and size of the ripples sent out in successive waves . . . It is often gripping, consistently engaging and from time to time genuinely affecting.

Mirabella

The Sweet Hereafter . . . is a close and haunting story of a small town in distress . . . unflinching and quietly powerful. Read all 12 "From The Critics" >

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