Sweet Hereafter: A Novel

Sweet Hereafter: A Novel
by Russell Banks

Sweet Hereafter: A Novel
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Book Summary Information

Author: Russell Banks
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 1992-08-05
ISBN: 0060923245
Number of pages: 272
Publisher: Harper Perennial
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Book Reviews of Sweet Hereafter: A Novel

Book Review: CAPTIVATING AND BEAUTIFULLY WRITTEN
Summary: 5 Stars

This is a great book that blew me away with its many layers of story and the credible tension that Russell Banks was able to create out of such a simple premise, it almost reads like a mystery. He writes in such a way that he opens up the small town of Sam Dent and deposits you right in the middle of it leaving you feeling like you personally know all the characters or might have once lived there yourself. It is also an interesting character study and from my experience realistic in the way each person here deals differently with grief; Some self-destruct while others find new strength, all want to lay blame somewhere and everyone in this once innocent town is irreversibly changed. Banks manages to show all sides of these ordinary characters, even the negative and because this was written from 4 different perspectives almost anyone will be able to find a piece of themselves in one of them. Ultimately it will leave you looking at yourself and those around you differently because every town has its secrets.

As I said the story is simple; One snowy morning a school bus goes off the road and into the frozen waters of a small American town, 14 children are lost in the accident and its citizens are confronted with life's most disturbing question when the worst happens who do you blame and how do you cope. We then enter surviving school bus driver Deloris Driscoll's head as she recalls the morning of the accident and introduces us to the town and its members while making stops along the bus route.

We then switch to widower and war veteran Billy Ansel who is following the bus on his way to work, his story is heartbreaking and full of secrets. The narration then turns to New York lawyer and pariah Mitchell Stevens who has come to Sam Dent like all the other lawyers and media to try and make a buck off the tragedy, surprisingly I really enjoyed his view as you can`t always judge a book (lawyer)by its cover. We also hear form 14 year old Nicole Burnell, who before the accident was a cheerleader and the town princess and is now confined to a wheelchair, her part in the story shocked me.

I highly recommend this and now hope to see if the movie can live up to this amazing book.

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.

Banks, Russell Books

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