Sweet Hereafter: A Novel
by Russell Banks
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Book Summary Information
Author: Russell BanksEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1992-06-26
ISBN: 0060923245
Number of pages: 257
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Book Reviews of Sweet Hereafter: A Novel
Book Review: Unique Format Provides Broad Insight into a Tragic Story
Summary: 5 Stars
One snowy morning a school bus careened off an embankment, killing fourteen children and leaving the small upstate New York town of Sam Dent forever changed. With literary mastery, author Russell Banks answers the implied question, "How does a small community respond when tragedy threatens to destroy its foundation?" This intricate story is unveiled by four narrators: the bus driver, a grief stricken father who witnessed the accident, a negligence attorney who feels a compelling connection to the grieving parent's plight, and a teenage girl who was crippled in the crash and who later became the determinative factor in the future of this small community.
The juxtaposition of the four separate narrators creates what literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin describes as polyphonic dialogue. Mr. Banks carefully shapes the consciousness of each narrator in a way that invites the reader to fully comprehend the intricate discourse of the people of Sam Dent. After reading one narrator's accounting of an event, the reader may be left with myriad of questions which will often come to light by deductively paying attention to each subsequent narrator. Mr. Banks does not lace the narrations with common underlying themes, but rather highlights the individual differences of each character, thereby allowing the reader to discover the connections and make key realizations as each narration builds upon the last. This creative interplay of multiple voices produces an intriguing, suspenseful, and honest story, leaving the sensitive reader no choice but to consider the totality of the circumstances before passing judgment.
The tale begins with the voice of the school bus driver Dolores Driscoll who appears to be thinking out loud while trying to make sense of a traumatic event. Mr. Banks paints Dolores as an honest, caring, and selfless woman, who is saddled with the guilt of being the person responsible for the death of fourteen children, whom she cared for as if they were her own. A brief factual description of this horrendous event would leave most people blaming Dolores, but Mr. Banks humanizes her, thus leaving the reader sympathetic to the poor woman's plight. Putting Dolores first in the order of narrations softens the reader's judgment of her and effectively facilitates an impartial review of the remaining narrations.
Billy Ansel, the ex-football hero, Vietnam veteran, cancer-widower, and father of two of the victims was the only witness to the bus crash, as he was following behind the bus while waving to his joy-filled children. His narration, like Dolores's, reads more like a journal than a story. The intimate details of his struggle with losing his wife are heart wrenching and his subsequent motivation to be a positive role-model for his children by remaining strong is admirable. The loss he suffers after the crash evokes nothing but empathy in the reader and Billy's downward spiral becomes not only understandable but seemingly unavoidable. Regardless of his despair, Billy has a strong resolve to move on with his life. When he hears about the attorneys who "swam north like sharks from Albany and New York City," Billy becomes enraged. Unlike most people in the town, he did not wish to blame anyone, although Banks seems to hint that Billy's detachment and self-destructive behavior were due in a large part to self-blame.
When Mitchell Stephens, Esquire reads about the Sam Dent tragedy in a New York newspaper he immediately makes the long drive upstate. If this story were told in any other way than first person, feeling empathy for the lawyer would be near impossible. However, Mr. Banks masterfully guides the reader through the mind of Mitchell Stephens. Stephens is a father of a drug-addicted daughter and this causes him to feel a connection to people who have suffered terrible loss. Stephens' motto is "There is no such thing as an accident," and he asserts that some company must have cut a corner somewhere, which ultimately led to unnecessary death. Mitchell Stephens is angry or more aptly "permanently pissed off" and it is his mission to "ensure moral responsibility in this society." Stephens' conviction convinced at least three families to share in his anger and he formed a class action suit against the school board and the state of New York. His strongest witness was the crippled teenager who survived the accident, but little did he know that she would also prove to be his worthiest adversary.
Nichole Burnell was the town princess, beautiful, talented, and intelligent. To the onlooker, she appeared to have a blessed life. Nichole begins her narration with the moment she wakes up in the hospital, and then she leads the reader through the ordeal of learning how to live with a permanently crippling condition. Although her body is damaged, Nichole's mind is sharp and she unhesitatingly discloses her innermost fears and feelings. Nichole's trials and tribulations are further personalized with her revelation of a deep secret, which manifests through passive-aggressiveness. Her tenacity and determination to obtain personal vindication drives her to make decisions that shape how this small-town community will survive the sweet hereafter.
Russell Banks skillfully guides his reader through the shattered lives of the people of Sam Dent. Reading this book is like putting together a 5000 piece jigsaw puzzle which upon completion brings tremendous satisfaction. It takes amazing literary aptitude to bridge four separate voices through polyphonic dialogue, but Mr. Banks believably attains this feat in a manner that makes this book a classic must-read for all literary enthusiasts.
Summary of Sweet Hereafter: A Novel
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?
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.
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