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Summary
Summary
From the critically acclaimed author of Affliction comes a story that begins with a school bus accident that kills 14 children from the town of Sam Dent, New York. A large-hearted novel, The Sweet Hereafter explores the community's response to the inexplicable loss of its children. Told from the point of view of four different narrators, the tale unfolds as both a contemporary courtroom drama and a small-town morality play.
Author Notes
The oldest of four children, Russell Banks spent his childhood and adolescence in New Hampshire and Eastern Massachusetts. His blue-collar, working-class background is strongly reflected in his writing.
The first in his family to attend college, Banks studied at Colgate University and later graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of North Carolina, at Chapel Hill. While he was establishing himself as a writer, Banks spent time as a plumber, shoe salesman, and a window dresser.
He wrote 21 books of fiction and nonfiction. Banks's 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 and Dreaming Up America. Banks has also written numerous poems, stories, and essays. His last novel was The Magic Kingdom was published in November 2022.
Banks is the recipient of several awards and prizes. Among his accolades are the St. Lawrence Award for Short Fiction, the John Dos Passos Award, and the Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1986, Continental Drift was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
Russell Banks died on January 7, 2023, at his home in upstate New York. He was 82.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
With resonating effect, Banks ( Continental Drift ; Affliction ) tackles the provocative subject of a fatal accident involving children, and its effect on a small community. On a frigid, snowy morning in the Adirondacks, veteran school bus driver Dolores Driscoll goes off the road, carrying 14 children to their deaths. Dolores survives; hers is the first and the last narrative voice here. Plainspoken and pragmatic, Dolores and her crippled husband have been longtime residents of the close-knit, economically depressed town of Sam Dents, but the accident makes her an outcast. The flat, almost uninflected voice of Vietnam vet and recent widower Billy Ansel, who witnessed the accident, reflects the numbness he now seeks: both his children died in the crash. Though Banks makes too much of Billy's ``noble'' character, he effectively portrays the man's refuge in drink and his downhill slide. When he introduces the obsessive, enraged voice of New York negligence lawyer Mitchell Stephens, who hopes to manipulate the bereaved into bringing suit against anyone he can find to blame, Banks jolts the narrative into high gear, and uses Stephens's contempt for the grieving parents--their ``sagging porches and rusting pickup trucks''--to render a clear sociological portrait of the community. Beautiful teenager Nicholesp ok? Burnell, crippled as a result of her injuries, takes revenge in her own way, propelling the novel to a moving denouement. Banks handles his dark theme with judicious restraint, empathy and compassion; the result is that this book is less downbeat than his previous works--and more powerful. 30,000 first printing; $45,000 ad/promo. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
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.
Booklist Review
Banks has made a name for himself with such darkly affecting works as Continental Drift. Only a writer of his stature and talent could attempt a book like this one--in which 14 children are killed in a school bus accident in Upstate New York--and make it bearable to read. As it turns out, he never convincingly accomplishes what seems to be his goal here: to portray "what happens to a town that loses its children." Part of the reason for that failure, however, is the strength of his characters, especially the four, distinctly different individuals who tell the story: we care about them as people, and we pay less attention to the group dynamics, though we do get the point that there must be someone to blame, someone to ostracize in order for the town to move on. Banks deserves applause for making us see how grief can manifest itself in countless unsuspected ways; he also earns our respect for describing the accident only once and with few horrifying details. ~--Deb Robertson
Library Journal Review
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 Angeles (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
