Product 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?

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #141357 in Books
• Published on: 1992-08-05
• Released on: 1992-06-26
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 272 pages

Amazon.com Review
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 Angeles
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Movie Versus Book
I know this space is usually reserved strictly for a review of the book, but since Amazon's review of "The Sweet Hereafter" makes many references to the clear superiority of the novel over the film, I feel obliged to briefly respond. And to passionately disagree.

The movie is not merely good; it is an outright masterpiece.

Banks' novel is strong and insightful on so many different levels, and I would have thought, by the very nature of its structure, that it would have been virtually impossible to bring to the screen. But Atom Egoyan has been able to write and film one of the most intensely intelligent screen adaptations I have ever seen. And Amazon's review about it completely misses the bus.

Banks brings to life his remote and icy small town clearly and realistically, and there is not a false note in his portrait of his characters or the isolated world they inhabit. Although we hear four different narrators throughout the story, the book always seems to be viewing its devastated people in Sam Dent from high above, as if they are under a microscope in their struggles to survive the worst that life offers.

Whereas Banks uses literary skills to reflect on his larger themes, Egoyan uses the breathtaking skill of his filmmaking to come up with a comparable work. "The Sweet Hereafter" is one of the great films of the '90s; like the book, it is not about death but about surviving the incomprehensible death of those closest to you.

Egoyan manipulates time in his film -- not as a gimmick but for similar purposes that Banks chooses various narrators to see some of the same events from different perspectives. Both works avoid using the bus crash as a literary or cinematic climax in any way; their profundity is in the examination of coping with loss, not about the loss itself.

Egoyan, of course, isn't able to give all of the background that Banks so beautifully captures about his characters. But his choices of what to include and how to include them are impeccable. The lawyer's "future" airplane trip where he meets Zoe's old friend is a perfectly believable and moving way to include the story of Zoe nearly dying as a child. In some ways, it serves as the muted centerpiece of the film.

Egoyan's choice of having Nichole read the poetic fairytale to the children she babysits is another brilliant inclusion not in the book; it adds unforgettable resonance to the work.

The books' last sequence works quite well, as Amazon notes, but Amazon's critique of the film's ending is simply way off base. The last image -- Nichole reading to the children the night before the crash and then walking toward the window where a light from the "sweet hereafter" reaches out to her -- shakes one to the core.

It's fashionable to criticize a film in comparison to a book, especially one as good as Banks' novel. But there is no need. Banks has created a terrific read that stays with you after the final page. But Egoyan has created a masterpiece in his own right, bringing Banks' novel to the screen as well as anyone could.

It is so completely rare to read a book so good made into a movie so good. I simply wish Amazon had recognized Egoyan's remarkable accomplishment as they did Banks' great read.

This book has an issue for everyone-a must read!!
The Sweet Hereafter is a compelling novel of a small town in America that has to overcome a devasating tragedy.

The novel is written from the perspective of four completely different narrators which is what makes the story so interesting. The way Russel Banks portrays each character can make even the most insensitive reader identify with them. The language he uses can make you almost hear the character speaking and makes them seem more realistic. A reader from any cultural background can read this book and get the feeling of a small town in America and sympathize with the characters in it. The novel is written so well that every point of view can be clearly seen even when the characters are expressing some of their negative attributes.

The way the people deal with the accident is what is so compelling because their lives can be altered in a positive or very negative way depending on how they deal with the influx of big city lawyers and media.This novel gives you an in depth look at how ordinary people deal with pain and loss. We see how certain relationships deteriorate and others develop after the tragedy. The way they see each other and the way the reader sees the characters will change drastically from beginning to end.

There are themes in this novel for everyone from secret affairs, loss of loved ones, alcoholism, selfishness, divorce and the need to blame others are just a few. Anyone can get involved in this book and will most probably see some aspects of their own lives in it.

The outcome of the novel was pleasantly surprising but it is inevitable to have a slight feeling of sadness for some of the characters. It is very realistic but not at all dull, everyone has to read this book!

Intensely moving
I was perusing the reviews of this book earlier, and I have to agree that this book is one of Russell Banks' most haunting, despondent, and beautiful pieces of prose. The Sweet Hereafter chronicles the story of four individuals who are struggling with the aftermath of a horrific school bus accident, resulting in the deaths of many schoolchildren riding that morning. The book uses four different narrators; there is Delores, the once tough but eternally optimistic driver who now is consumed by guilt. Another voice is Billy Ansel, the ruggedly handsome widower who witnesses the accident from his truck. With the death of his twin son and daughter, Ansel becomes grief-stricken and shuts out any possibility of redemption, offerd in the form of a personal injury lawyer, who placed blame on the town and offers promise of financial reparitions. The lawyer is Mitchell Stephens, who also is reeling from the "death" of a child; his daughter has disappeared into a lifestyle of drugs and detox centers. The fourth and perhaps most intriguing voice is Nicole Burnell, a former cheerleader now paralyzed by the accident. She is a crucial witness for Stephens, and her surprising actions reveal ambiguous motives. I can't really reveal too much more about her, but she is the most interesting character in the book, in part because it is never clear why she does what she does. The book also has a heatwrenching epilogue, demonstating that, in a story like this, there can be no neat sense of closure. Rather, the devastation of survival plagues and haunts each member of the community, and time does not heal suffering, but rather prolongs it.
Another reviewwer commented that the book was light on dialogue. Indeed, it is. However, I think it is necessary to omit large chunks of conversation, because so much of the book centers on the internal process of grief and the ianbility of hte characters to express their emotions effectively to others. Everything just shuts down, becomes static, and indeed, suspends people in a "sweet hereafter." This is an incredible book by one of the greatest contemporary authors in the United States. The film adaptaion is also stellar, with fantastic work by Ian Holm and a parade of talented Canadian actors.