The Sweet Hereafter

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The Sweet Hereafter
Russell Banks
1991

Introduction
Author Biography
Plot Summary
Characters
Themes
Style
Historical Context
Critical Overview
Criticism
Sources
Further Reading

Introduction

Russell Banks's sixth novel, The Sweet Hereafter tells the tragic story of a school bus accident, revealing how it impacts the lives of individuals as well as the community as a whole. In The Reading List, Contemporary Fiction, Banks is quoted as saying, "I wanted to write a novel in which the community was the hero, rather than a single individual." Although the story is told from the perspectives of four individual narrators, the importance of the community emerges as a strong unifying element.

The Sweet Hereafter has been embraced by critics and readers alike for its unique narrative structure. Banks's intention in writing the novel this way was to avoid what he considers the artifice of omniscient narration and the somewhat preachy tone that often accompanies it. Instead, Banks chose to tell the story four times, each time from a different perspective that is unique, realistic, and limited. The result is a more intimate tone that allows the reader to understand how a single incident can create such different feelings in different individuals. The narration reveals varied threads of guilt, blame, and recovery, and places them in the larger fabric of a community's reaction to a tragedy.

Author Biography

Russell Earl Banks was born March 28, 1940, in Newton, Massachusetts, the eldest of Earl and Flo-rence Banks' four children. They were a working-class family who reared their children in Barnstead, New Hampshire. Banks's early life was fraught with difficulty. He endured near-poverty with his family and watched his parents' marriage decline into divorce. Today, Banks is married to his fourth wife and is the father of four daughters.

At the age of eighteen, Banks enrolled at Colgate College but dropped out after only eight weeks. He felt out of place because his fellow students were wealthy. He decided to join Fidel Castro's revolution in Cuba but could only afford to go as far as Florida, where he took odd jobs and lived in a trailer park. At that time, he began writing short fiction. In the mid-1960s, he traveled to the Yucatán and Jamaica; these experiences would later appear in his fiction as would his memories of life in rural New England.

Banks completed an English degree at the University of North Carolina in 1967 and has since written a succession of novels and short stories. His early fiction demonstrates his experimentation with different styles and with blending genres, such as fantasy and realism. From the beginning, his interest has been in communicating the difficulties of life and the relationship between modern people and tradition. In the 1980s, Banks focused his attention more sharply on social hardships, and his fiction began to explore racial injustice, class discrimination, poverty, and alcoholism.

Continental Drift (1985) was Banks's first novel to receive widespread acclaim from literary critics. Since its publication, the author's work has been held up as some of the best contemporary American fiction. The Sweet Hereafter (1991), Banks's sixth novel, won critical acclaim and was adapted in 1997 as an award-winning film of the same title. His novel Affliction (1990) was also adapted to film in a 1998 movie of the same title.

In addition to writing, Banks has taught at various colleges and universities, including Sarah Lawrence and Princeton. He has earned many fellowships and awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship (1976), two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships (1977, 1983), an American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award (1986), and an O. Henry Memorial Award for his short stories.

Plot Summary

Dolores Driscoll

As The Sweet Hereafter opens, a tragic bus accident resulting in the deaths of fourteen children has taken place in the small, rural town of Sam Dent in upstate New York. Each of four characters addresses the reader, describing in turn how the accident affected him or her.

Dolores Driscoll, the first narrator, has been a school bus driver for twenty-two years and was driving the bus at the time of the accident. She lives with her husband, Abbott, who has been wheelchair-bound since suffering a devastating stroke. Dolores recalls the events of the day of the accident, describing many of the children and their families. First, she picks up the Lamston kids, three quiet children who come from a dysfunctional home. Next, she picks up eleven-year-old Bear Otto, the adopted Native-American son of Wanda and Hartley Otto. Dolores explains that the Ottos are "hippies" who are also model citizens. She adds that Bear is "one of those rare children who brings out the best in people instead of the worst."

After picking up several other children, Dolores notices that it is beginning to snow. She is not worried, however, because she is a seasoned driver in this area and is accustomed to its severe weather.

Her next stop is the motel run by Risa and Wendell Walker to get five-year-old Sean. He is a sickly boy with a learning disability whose video game prowess earns him the respect of the other children. On this day, he is especially frightened to leave his mother so fourteen-year-old Nichole Burnell asks him to sit with her. The next stop is Billy Ansel's home, where Dolores picks up Billy's nine-year-old twins, Jessica and Mason. Once the twins are on the bus, Billy leaves for work, following the bus into town. In all, Dolores picks up thirty-four children although she does not describe each one.

As the snow gets heavier, Dolores concentrates on the road and sees what looks like a dog running across it. She remembers making a conscious choice to swerve to miss it, as a result of which the bus crashes through a guardrail and plunges into the water-filled sandpit below, which is covered with a thick layer of ice. The last memory she relates is of the children being thrown around the bus as the vehicle tips over.

Billy Ansel

Billy Ansel is a widower whose twins die in the bus accident. A Vietnam veteran, he owns a garage in town. Because Billy followed the bus into town each day, he witnessed the accident. He admits that while he was driving that day, he was thinking about Risa Walker. Risa is the wife of one of Billy's friends, and he is having an affair with her. He talks at length about the affair.

Billy's wife has died of cancer. He remembers good times they had and recalls a frightening incident that happened during a family vacation in Jamaica. Distracted, he and his wife left their daughter at a grocery store and did not realize it until they were almost back to the home they were renting. He remembers how afraid he was that he had lost his daughter forever and how relieved he was to find her safe.

Billy remembers throwing himself into action after the bus accident, helping the rescuers. Although onlookers thought he was being brave, he only wanted to keep busy to delay facing the reality of his personal loss. Later, he starts drinking heavily and keeps to himself.

Billy tells of his first encounter with Mitchell Stevens. He had gone out to look at the bus, which was parked behind his garage. While he was there, Mitchell approached him, asking if he needed legal representation. Billy's response was harsh; he had no interest in a lawsuit that would do nothing to fill the void in his life or in the community.

Mitchell Stephens, Esquire

A lawyer from New York City, Mitchell Stephens arrives in Sam Dent (as do many lawyers) after reading about the bus accident. Mitchell is passionate about this type of case because he has a personal vendetta against the blameworthy. Admitting that Dolores is a bad candidate for blame (because she has no money and is an upstanding member of the community) he sets his sights on the city and possibly the school board.

Mitchell is divorced and has a grown daughter who has adopted a life of sex and drugs. During his stay in Sam Dent, she calls him to say that she has AIDS and speaks to him in her usual adversarial way. Mitchell loves his daughter but does not know how to handle her. He remembers when she was an infant and was bitten by baby black widow spiders. Speeding to the hospital miles away, he held her and kept her calm but was prepared to perform a tracheotomy if necessary, as the doctor had instructed.

Mitchell represents the Walkers, the Ottos, and the Burnells in a lawsuit. He is counting on Nichole's testimony because she can be portrayed as the ultimate victim. He also intends to subpoena Billy to testify that Dolores was not driving over the speed limit although he does not know whether this is true. His strategy seems to be to tell both Dolores and Billy that the other needs confirmation that they were driving fifty-two miles per hour; Mitchell hopes that they will both agree to that story because he needs for them to agree in court although neither is sure how fast they were going.

Nichole Burnell

A survivor of the bus accident, Nichole is a beautiful and intelligent fourteen-year-old girl. Prior to the accident, she was a cheerleader and at the top of her class. Because of the accident, she is now confined to a wheelchair.

Nichole lives with her parents, two brothers, and little sister. Her terrible secret is that her father has been sexually abusing her. Now that she is disabled, he leaves her alone, and she becomes aware of the power she has over him because she holds this secret.

Nichole feels angry and bitter about her condition. She has nothing in common with her friends, and everyone in town pities her. Eventually, she makes peace with being wheelchair-bound, but when she graduates second in her class, she refuses to make a speech. She has been studying at home and has no desire to be put on display.

Nichole disagrees with her parents' decision to try to cash in on her condition with a lawsuit. When she meets Mitchell, she likes him, but comes to believe that the best thing for the community is for the lawyers to leave. She makes a decision to lie on the witness stand to undermine Mitchell's case. She claims that she could see that Dolores was driving well over the speed limit, which means that Mitchell cannot blame the city or the school board for the accident.

Dolores Driscoll

Dolores and Abbott have stayed out of Sam Dent, running their errands at other nearby towns. Dolores has gotten work as a driver for the hotels in Lake Placid but when the county fair begins in Sam Dent, she and Abbott decide to attend the demolition derby. Dolores notices that everyone is snubbing them, but she dismisses it with the assumption that they are still not ready to see her. Billy shows up, drunk and with a woman, and sits with the Driscolls. When Nichole arrives and everyone claps, Billy explains to his date that Nichole saved the town from the lawsuits. This gets Abbott's attention, who demands to know what he means, and Billy is forced to tell them about Nic-hole's testimony against Dolores. Because the Driscolls had stayed out of Sam Dent, they had not heard about it.

As Dolores absorbs this news, the demolition derby begins, and her old car (which has been bought by a local man) is in the middle. As the other cars smash into it, the crowd cheers its destruction. Oddly, when the driver of her car starts destroying other cars and eventually wins, the crowd cheers for that, too. After the victory, Dolores and Abbott leave, and they are met with a little more respect by the townspeople.

Characters

Billy Ansel

Billy Ansel is a widower and Vietnam veteran whose twins are killed in the bus accident that is the novel's central event. His wife is deceased, and they were his only children, so their deaths leave him alone in the world. Billy owns and manages a garage in Sam Dent where he hires other Vietnam veterans. He is handsome, charming, and well-liked. He says that he likes to be in charge because he is the eldest of five children of an incompetent mother and an absent father. His mother now suffers from Alzheimer's disease and lives in a nursing home. His sisters are all married and have children, and his brother rarely calls. Billy is having an affair with Risa Walker, the wife of a friend. Nobody else in the town knows about the affair and after the accident, they no longer see each other.

Billy always leaves for work after his children board the school bus, and his habit is to follow the bus into town. Because of this, he witnesses the accident. Although he never talks about seeing the accident, he does relate how he helped the rescuers after it happened. He admits that this was his way of delaying facing the reality of his loss. In the following days, Billy begins drinking heavily and staying at home. He attends his children's funeral only to avoid calling attention to himself. As members of the town join various lawsuits, Billy is angry because he hates what the lawsuits are doing to the town he has always loved.

When Billy's children are killed, he finds he has no idea how to handle it. Prior to the accident, he thought he understood death from his experience in Vietnam and from losing his wife, but this loss is more than he can bear. He finds no comfort at all in religion and feels that many of the attempts by churchgoers to comfort the bereft are insulting.

At the end of the novel, Billy is seen drinking and going to the demolition derby with a woman who is not from Sam Dent.

Mrs. Burnell

Mrs. Burnell is Nichole's mother. She is passive, religious, and self-righteous. If she knows anything about her husband's sexual abuse of their daughter, she never indicates this. She generally avoids dealing with difficult issues in a direct manner.

Nichole Burnell

Nichole is a fourteen-year-old girl who is confined to a wheelchair after surviving the bus accident. Prior to the accident, she was a popular cheerleader and was among the school's best students. The people of the town think well of her, and she baby-sits many of the younger children. What nobody knows is that her father has been sexually abusing her, a fact that made her feel ashamed before the accident. Now that she is in a wheelchair and her father will not touch her, she feels powerful because she is safe from further abuse and still holds the secret that her father wants hidden.

Nichole is initially bitter and angry about her wheelchair-bound status, but she gradually comes to accept it. She is an insightful and intelligent girl who is able to see people for what they really are. She is sensitive and loving and looks after the children on the bus.

When Nichole overhears Billy asking her father to drop the lawsuit because of what it will do to the town, she decides to undermine the case her father's lawyer is building. In her testimony, she lies and says that she saw that Dolores was driving seventy-two miles per hour. She knows that her parents were counting on the money from the lawsuit, but she also knows that her father will never say anything to her about it because he is afraid she will reveal the secret of his abuse.

Sam Burnell

Sam Burnell is Nichole's father. He is domineering in his family but friendly to others. He has been sexually abusing Nichole, but nobody else knows about it. After the accident, he is uncomfortable around Nichole so he begins to be kind and respectful toward her. Although he had been counting on the money from the lawsuit, he says nothing to Nichole when she sabotages it.

Abbott Driscoll

Abbott is Dolores's husband. A stroke has left him disabled. He is an intelligent man whose wisdom is a source of guidance and comfort to his wife. His protective nature is revealed in the scene in which Billy mentions Nichole's testimony but is hesitant to tell the Driscolls any more about it. Abbott asks what Billy means by his comment that Nichole saved the town from the lawsuits, and when he senses Billy's unwillingness to elaborate, Abbott stares at him until he tells the rest of the story. Abbott realizes that Billy knows something about Dolores, and when Billy tries to hide it, Abbott forces the truth out of him. This prevents Dolores from having to continue living in ignorance and gives her the opportunity to defend herself if she chooses.

Dolores Driscoll

Dolores Driscoll is the school bus driver who is driving on the day of the accident. She has been driving the bus for twenty-two years and genuinely loves her job. She does all the maintenance on her bus, feeling that she alone will see to every detail. In the summer, she works at the post office. Dolores is a large woman with red hair and a sharp voice. She keeps order on the bus but only insists that the children follow a few rules. She is married to Abbott, who is disabled due to a stroke. Although nobody else understands him when he speaks, Dolores claims to be able to translate. (Mitchell expresses his doubt of her ability, claiming that she merely hears what she wants or needs to hear, rather than what Abbott is actually saying. The reader is never told conclusively which is the truth.) They have two sons, who are grown and have moved out of Sam Dent.

Media Adaptations

In 1997, an acclaimed film of the same name, directed by Atom Egoyan, was based on The Sweet Hereafter. The film earned Academy Award nominations and won awards at the Cannes Film Festival in addition to being a nominee for the festival's highest honor, the Golden Palm. The film adaptation earned numerous other awards and nominations from various film and script societies in the United States and Canada. In an interview with The Writer, Banks called the film "brilliant" and "a marvelous piece of work" that is "very imaginative and serious without being somber." The film was produced by Alliance Communications Corporation, Ego Film Arts, and The Harold Greenberg Fund.

A lifelong resident of Sam Dent, Dolores is haunted by the loss of the fourteen children who died in the accident. She feels she owes it to all of the children to attend their funerals, but does not want to cause any additional pain by her presence, so she sits in the back and leaves early. As the town heals, she begins spending more time in the neighboring city of Lake Placid. Because of her absence from everyday life in Sam Dent, she is unaware of Nichole's testimony that she was driving seventy-two miles per hour on the day of the accident. When she is told about this, she feels a sense of relief rather than anger. This reaction is confusing to many readers, and Dolores only explains that being singled out for blame lifts an enormous weight from her shoulders. Perhaps she sees the fact that Nichole lied about her speeding as confirmation that, in fact, she was not speeding, something of which she herself is not completely certain. Another possible explanation is that being singled out by the community actually allows her to distance herself from the tragedy; perhaps it is easier to be a villain than a victim. Whatever the explanation, she is unwilling to permanently leave her hometown although many of the townspeople will always resent and blame her.

Hartley Otto

Hartley Otto is Wanda's husband and Bear's father. He wears long hair and sandals and seems to be happy letting his wife be the decision-maker. To many residents of Sam Dent, the Ottos appear to be hippies. Hartley is originally from South Dakota, but he and his wife have become members of the Sam Dent community.

Hartley and his wife adopted Bear, a Native-American orphan, when they believed they would be unable to have children of their own. The lawyer who is preparing the lawsuit over the accident supposes that they were able to adopt Bear because Hartley is part Native American himself.

Wanda Otto

Wanda Otto is Hartley's wife and Bear's mother. Bear, the Ottos' adopted son, is killed in the bus accident, and Wanda is filled with a desire for vengeance. Despite the fact that she is not a native of Sam Dent (she is originally from Long Island), she has become integrated into the community. She and Hartley decided to move to Sam Dent when they were counselors at a nearby summer camp; they borrowed money from Wanda's father to build their house.

Wanda has long, dark hair, and wears turquoise and silver jewelry. She is intelligent, college-educated, and speaks her mind. The lawyer representing the Ottos senses immediately that Wanda is the decision-maker in the family and it is she who ultimately decides to go forward with the lawsuit.

Wanda and her husband live a carefree lifestyle, characterized by loose-fitting clothes, herbal teas, and natural furnishings in their handmade, dome-shaped house. It is rumored in town that they grow marijuana. They adopted Bear (a Native-American orphan) because they believed they would never conceive. At the time of Bear's death, however, Wanda is pregnant.

Mitchell Stephens

Mitchell Stephens is an attorney from New York City who arrives in Sam Dent after hearing about the bus accident. He says that he pursues this type of case because he is on a mission to make sure that the people responsible for such tragedies pay for their negligence. He is passionate about this mission, even though he says that working on such cases is difficult, humiliating, and diminishing.

Mitchell is divorced and his only child, Zoe, is always on the run. She lives a life of sex and drugs and occasionally calls him (from a different city every time) to get money. Even though Mitchell knows she will use it for drugs, he is afraid of how she will get the money if he denies her requests. He loves his daughter deeply, but has run out of ideas as to how to handle her. He has tried every imaginable route, but she is out of control. Readers sense that, because he has lost his child, he is driven to help other people who have lost theirs.

Mitchell is very observant and able to understand what is not being said when he talks to the people of the town. For example, he senses immediately that Risa is having an affair and, based on Risa's body language when Billy's name is spoken, he deduces that Billy is her lover. Mitchell is also an expert manipulator. He makes Billy believe that he is trying to recruit him for his lawsuit when he is actually trying to make sure that Billy will not join any lawyer's lawsuit so that he can be an unbiased witness. Mitchell is likeable and easy to talk to, but he always has an agenda.

Risa Walker

Risa Walker is Wendell's wife and Billy's lover. She and Wendell were high school sweethearts who married and then fell into a disintegrating marriage. They run a motel in Sam Dent although Risa is the one who works hard to try to maintain it. She wears manly clothes and rarely presents herself in a feminine way. She enjoys the fantasy that she and Billy are in love, but she is as aware as Billy that it is not a deeply meaningful relationship. After the accident, she and Billy stop seeing each other and she begins to consider divorcing her husband.

Wendell Walker

Wendell Walker is Risa's husband and a friend of Billy's. He spends most of his time in front of the television and does not seem to have any suspicion that his wife is involved in an affair.

Themes

Perception

By using four points of view, Banks shows readers how the same events are interpreted differently by different people. He also demonstrates how a person's background influences the way he or she understands and reacts to a situation. For example, Dolores prides herself on taking good care of the bus. From her perspective, she does the best job of maintaining it because she is personally committed to her role as a bus driver. On the other hand, Billy questions her ability to properly oversee the maintenance of the bus. This is not surprising, given that he is the mechanic who maintains all of the other school buses.

Topics For Further Study

Look through a recent newspaper to find a story about a tragic incident or other human interest story. Choose four people related to the incident (either by taking names from the story or by imagining related people) and write one page about the incident from each person's point of view. Following Banks's example, keep in mind each person's background, occupation, and personality when writing on his or her behalf. Each account should be written in the first person, and you will need to make up many details about the people.
Conduct library research on the psychology of parents who have experienced the death of a child, or arrange to interview a therapist and/or a member of the clergy about the sensitive topic of parents who have lost children. Find out if the response to this tragedy follows a typical course or if everyone is different. What consistencies do you find between what your research tells you and Banks's portrayal of the distraught parents? Summarize your findings in a presentation.
Review the last chapter of The Sweet Hereafter, in which Banks tells of the demolition derby and the victory of Boomer. Paying close attention to details and to Dolores's reactions, look for symbolism in this scene. What uses of symbolism do you notice and how are they presented? Does anything in this scene change your reaction to or thoughts about Dolores?
Truth is an important concern in the narration of The Sweet Hereafter. Different characters conceptualize the truth in different ways. On what basis might you judge the truthfulness of the four narrators of the story? Present evidence from the novel in an argument supporting the truthfulness of one of these characters, as if you were a lawyer arguing a case before a judge. Then present evidence from the novel in an argument against the truthfulness of that same character.
What is the role of truth in The Sweet Hereafter? Different characters approach it in different ways. Do you find it is easy or difficult to judge the truthfulness of the characters? See what three major philosophers have to say about truth, and apply these principles to one character in the novel. You may choose any philosophers, such as Socrates (the Socratic method for arriving at truth), Plato, Buddha, Soren Kierkegaard, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Henry David Thoreau, or Ralph Waldo Emerson. Present an argument for or against the character's truthfulness as if you were a lawyer arguing a case before a judge.

Banks relates the scene in which Billy and Mitchell first meet at the garage from both men's points of view, which enables the reader to experience a single exchange from two very different perspectives. Another example of Banks's presentation of the theme of differing perceptions is in the fact that Wendell is unaware of his wife's infidelity while Mitchell detects it right away. Wendell feels detached from his wife and therefore is not particularly interested in what she does. Mitchell, on the other hand, is an attorney who is accustomed to reading people to interpret what is not being said. He not only figures out that Risa is having an affair but soon surmises that the affair is with Billy based on Risa's body language when his name is mentioned.

There are numerous subtle ways in which Banks comments on the nature of perception in The Sweet Hereafter. For example, Billy states that he believes Dolores is in denial about the whole tragedy, but the reader knows that Dolores is plagued by guilt and self-doubt. She attends the funerals and memorial services because she feels it is the right thing to do, but she sits in the back and leaves before anyone else does. Billy, however, does not attend all of the services, so his perception is limited by his lack of observation of Dolores's actions.

Another contrast in the perceptions of two different characters is that Dolores perceives people who vacation in Sam Dent every year as outsiders while Mitchell thinks that because he spends most of six months there, he is practically a resident. When Mitchell arrives in town, he feels out of place in his suit so he begins wearing casual clothes to blend in with the locals. Nichole comes to believe that the casual attire is his preferred dress, and she is surprised when she sees him in court in his pinstriped suit.

Mitchell and Nichole also have opposing views of the tragedy because Mitchell does not believe in accidents while Nichole states that "the truth was that it was an accident, that's all, and no one was to blame."

Response to Tragedy

At the center of the novel is the terrible tragedy that claims the lives of fourteen children. From this event come a variety of reactions. At the scene of the accident, Dolores reacts by sitting alone and mumbling to herself while Billy reacts by helping the rescuers. He feels that if he keeps moving, he will delay having to face his personal loss. Many people sob and take refuge in the arms of friends while others walk slowly and silently in disbelief. Afterward, some people continue their lives, some are consumed by anger and vengeance, some are in denial, and some move to other towns.

Once he faces the reality of what has happened, Billy descends into drinking and seclusion, emerging only to attend his children's funeral. His decision to go to the funeral has less to do with his desire to go through the mourning ritual than it does with his need to avoid calling attention to himself. He explains how the accident permanently changes his relationship with Risa. He comments, "She was like a stranger to me then, a stranger whose life had just been made utterly meaningless. I know this because I felt the same way…. Our individual pain was so great that we could not recognize any other." Rather than turn to each other for comfort and understanding, Billy and Risa lose the sense of intimacy they shared prior to the tragedy.

Community

The Sweet Hereafter takes place within a single small town. By exploring its reaction to an unthinkable tragedy, Banks shows how an established community can be resilient and self-reliant. The people of Sam Dent never seek help from outside; there is never a call for therapists, arbiters, or state or federal help for the families paying for hospital costs. Although the community becomes divided, it ultimately survives the bus accident tragedy and continues to thrive. In fact, the community seems to be greater than the sum of its parts because some members leave, yet the community of Sam Dent remains intact.

There is something at stake for all the residents of Sam Dent in the aftermath of the bus accident, whether they are seeking support or acceptance from the community. For Billy, Risa, Nichole, and others, the community ultimately provides support and stability. On the other hand, Dolores seeks forgiveness and acceptance back into the community. These characters are not able to permanently remove themselves from the community because the community alone can provide them with what they most need.

Style

Alternating Point-of-View

The Sweet Hereafter is structured by narrators rather than by chapters. There are four narrators, all of whom speak once, with the exception of Dolores, who speaks twice. As the author switches narrators, he presents the characters' points-of-view by taking into consideration their life experiences, backgrounds, occupations, and personal relationships. This allows the reader to peek into the psyches of four distinct people, understanding their motivations for the decisions they make. The reader senses that the speakers are confiding in a trusted confidant: Nichole admits that she lied, and Billy states, "I can only tell you how it felt." Such com-ments signal to the reader that the speaker is being completely honest in his or her account.

At the same time, Banks is careful to present limited perspectives because none of the narrators are omniscient. By piecing together what each of the four narrators relates, the reader has a fuller and deeper experience of the story. This technique also leaves questions unanswered, such as when Nichole planned her lie and whether she considered beforehand the ramifications to her life and to Dolores's life. The unanswered questions are what draw many readers further into the story because the reader is forced to make assumptions and predictions based not on what the author presents as fact, but on what the narrators present as their perspectives.

Simile

Although Banks presents four distinct narratives, one tendency they all have in common is the use of similes (a figure of speech comparing two unlike things), which serve as a subtle uniting element among the four voices. That four characters as different from one another as Dolores, Billy, Mitchell, and Nichole would all share this characteristic seems unlikely. Thus, this consistency across the four narratives reminds the reader that, as fully-formed as these characters are, they are all the creations of a single writer.

Dolores describes the children as they wait for her to pick them up for school as being "like berries waiting to be plucked." Commenting on their behavior on the bus she says they do "everything we ourselves do, the way puppies and kittens at play mimic grown dogs and cats at work."

Similarly, Billy recalls an incident many years ago when he was driving, and he looked in the back seat to see the twins, expecting "them to be asleep, curled up in each other's arms like litter mates, like puppies or kittens." Remembering the scene of the accident, Billy remarks:

The bus had not been hauled out—you could see the front end of the vehicle up on the ice-cluttered far bank of the pit, like some huge dying yellow beast caught struggling to clamber out and frozen in the midst of the attempt, with the rest of the thing underwater. The snow and the cold made everyone down there—the rescue workers, the wet-suited divers from Burlington, the state troopers—move slowly, hunched in their bodies as if with fear and permanent resentment, like lifetime prisoners in a Siberian gulag.

Mitchell and Nichole use similes, too. Explaining why he is so passionate about tragic cases, Mitchell says that, even though in the end he comes out "feeling diminished, like a cinder," he believes fervently that people should be accountable for their negligence in causing such accidents. Commenting on Billy's voice, he describes it as "low but thin, flattened out, like a piece of tin," and describes Wendell's standing posture as "very tough … like a fist."

On the first page of her narration, Nichole compares the time before the accident to the time after it happened by saying, "it's like a door between rooms, and there was one room on the far side, and that room I remember fine, and another on the near side, and I remember it too. I'm still in it. But I don't have any memory of passing through." When her father takes her home from the hospital, he wheels her up a new ramp he has built. This only makes Nichole feel "like I was a new piece of furniture." After the accident, Nichole's wheelchair makes her father behave differently toward her. She says, "To Daddy, it was like I was made of spun glass and he was afraid he would break me if he touched me."

Historical Context

Political and Economic Turmoil

In 1991, the year The Sweet Hereafter was published, the United States won a military skirmish in the Persian Gulf and suffered an economic recession at home. In 1990, President George Bush had officially brought an end to the Cold War by negotiating with Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. He also had sent American troops to defend Kuwait from Iraq in what was called Operation Desert Shield. When it became clear that Saddam Hussein, Iraq's dictator, would not withdraw military forces from Kuwait, Bush sent enough troops to go on the offense. In January 1991, the bombing of Iraq began, and Operation Desert Shield became Operation Desert Storm. By February, Iraq was defeated.

At the same time, America's economy was in the midst of a recession. Since 1983, the economy had been thriving; this growth slowed in 1989 and 1990, and came to a halt in 1991. One result of this downturn was a rise in unemployment in 1992, an election year. These issues were disturbing enough to Americans that President George Bush's overseas victory was not enough to secure his reelection. Although Bush had an impressive 90 percent approval rating in popular polls in 1990, in 1992 he lost the election (to Bill Clinton), getting only 37 percent of the popular vote.

Life in Rural Upstate New York

Banks depicts life in the fictitious town of Sam Dent, modeled after many of the rural communities in upstate New York. Context clues tell the reader that Sam Dent is near the Adirondack Mountains and Lake Placid. Life in this area can be very difficult because of harsh weather conditions, but the lifestyle is markedly slower than that of a busy city. In fact, people in such towns often perceive city life (especially New York City life) as something completely removed from their reality. Most residents have lived in the same town all their lives; in many cases their families have lived there for generations. The population consists mainly of families, with a limited number of single people. The result is a close-knit community of people who have known one another for years and who know many of one another's secrets. A strong sense of community results, and the members work together to prevent anything from threatening their secure world.

For entertainment, people often get together to go bowling or see a movie. High school sports are popular, and residents support their local athletes in football, baseball, and lacrosse. Many towns have an ongoing rivalry with a nearby town, which heightens the excitement of sports. While the winters are harsh, the summers invite a wide array of outdoor activities. There is generally a town square where people meet socially, and many men are members of organizations like The Rotary Club or The Lion's Club.

Economically, people in the rural towns on which Sam Dent is based are poor or middle-class. For some, their livelihood relies heavily on the thick forests, mountains, and lakes that provide food and materials for shelter. Industry is limited although there are lumber and mining (iron ore and zinc) companies, farms (dairy and corn), and a tourism industry. Most restaurants and stores are family owned.

Critical Overview

From tone to theme to style, critics applaud Banks's accomplishment in this novel.

Many find The Sweet Hereafter to be a moving novel about how tragedy affects individuals and a community. Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times finds that The Sweet Hereafter is "often grip-ping, consistently engaging, and from time to time genuinely affecting." In Booklist, Joanne Wilkinson describes the novel as "haunting" in its portrayal of grief and guilt.

Banks's ability to move in and out of different personae impresses critics, who find this style compelling and artful. They generally agree that this approach to the subject gives a true portrayal of the complicated reactions to tragedy. Kakutani observes that Banks's narrative technique "creates a mosaic-like study of the ways in which a community copes with tragedy."

Reviewers are drawn to Banks's realistic handling of the theme of accidents as unlucky and uncontrollable events that happen in people's lives. A critic for Economist commends Banks's ability to communicate "moral ambiguity," adding that by "examining the crash through the sometimes overlapping, sometimes conflicting, accounts of four people whose lives are utterly changed by it, the novel also ponders the wider damage such a disaster does."

Richard Eder of the Los Angeles Times Book Review finds Banks's novel to be a "remarkable book" that captures the response of a community in a time of unbelievable tragedy. Eder is impressed with Banks's compassionate portrayal of this community and the stories of its citizens.

Many critics comment on Banks's moving portrayal of a community in crisis. Eder commends Banks's use of "a small town's response to tragedy to write a novel of compelling moral suspense." Kakutani notes that "Banks uses the school bus accident as a catalyst for illuminating the lives of the town's citizens. 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." A reviewer for Publishers Weekly writes, "With resonating effect, Banks … tackles the provocative subject of a fatal accident involving children, and its effect on a small community." The reviewer adds that Banks handles this "dark theme" with compassion and control.

Most critics rank The Sweet Hereafter among Banks's best work, if not the best example to date of his fiction.

Criticism

Jennifer Bussey

Bussey holds a master's degree in interdisciplinary studies and a bachelor's degree in English literature. She is an independent writer specializing in literature. In the following essay, she evaluates Banks's novel, explaining why the small-town setting makes the book's tragedy more devastating to the fictional community—and, by extension, to readers—than it would be if it were set in a big city.

In The Sweet Hereafter, Russell Banks demonstrates how devastating the loss of fourteen children is to a small town. The author tells the tragic story of a school bus accident and its aftermath through the voices of four individual characters and portrays clearly the effects of this tragedy on the entire community of Sam Dent. While readers easily understand the grief felt by parents whose children die, the grief felt by the community as a whole may be less understandable. After all, tragic events like the bus accident are not terribly uncommon in modern life, and people who are not directly affected are sympathetic but do not usually feel the deep sense of loss felt by the people of Sam Dent. Clearly, something very important is at stake for the community of Sam Dent that is not at stake in larger American towns and cities. In examining the closeness of the community, the importance of the children as the future of the community, specific comments made by two of the narrators, and the ways in which people react to the tragedy, it becomes clear that the children's deaths actually jeopardize the future of Sam Dent.

Throughout the novel, Banks emphasizes the tight-knit nature of this small rural community. Dolores explains, "Sam Dent was our permanent lifelong community. We belonged to this town, we always had, and they to us; nothing could change that, I thought. It was like a true family." Sam Dent is a town whose residents have lived there all their lives; in many cases, their families have lived there for generations. Everyone knows everyone else; they know one another's families, histories, joys and pains, and status in the town. They accept one another, know what they can expect from one another, and in times of crisis they protect and support one another. As Dolores says, the community is a sort of extended family because everyone has personal feelings about everyone else, and they all go through their trials and tribulations together.

Under the most extreme circumstances, the people of Sam Dent remain protective of one another. Dolores's experience shows how the people respond when one of their own becomes a villain. Prior to Nichole's testimony, people are not sure how to treat Dolores, but they never resort to hate-ful or violent acts. In a larger town where people do not know one another, the residents are quicker to judge and to act on their judgment. Despite questions about Dolores's driving, the people know that she is well-meaning, kind, and loves the children of the town. Mitchell knows immediately that Dolores is not a good candidate to sue, not just because she has no money, but because the people of the town will not support suing her. In addition, he knows that a jury, like the people of Sam Dent, will see her as a victim of the accident rather than as a hardened criminal. After Nichole's testimony (that Dolores was speeding), the town holds Dolores responsible for the accident, yet she is not run out of town. When Nichole gives her damning testimony, she asks her father if anything will happen to Dolores, to which he responds, "Nobody wants to sue Dolores. She's one of us."

Not only is Dolores not sued, she is not even approached by anyone in the town. She only learns about the testimony when she runs into Billy at the demolition derby. The worst that happens to her is that she is socially snubbed. Granted, in this community, being a social outcast is a serious burden to bear, but Dolores has temporarily carried on with her life in Lake Placid while the town heals. The novel ends on a hopeful note for Dolores, who is slowly accepted by a few members of the community and resolves to stay in Sam Dent, regardless. What the reader learns from Dolores's experience is that she is right about the community being like a family. To many, she is responsible for the deaths of innocent children, yet the strength of the community is such that she is still considered an important member.

Within such a close community, the loss of fourteen children is tremendous; virtually every person in Sam Dent feels the grief because the children represent the future of the community itself. The children are important, not just to secure the future of their individual families, but to ensure that the small community will go on as it has for generations past. In a larger town, people would receive the news as sad and unfair, but to a town like Sam Dent, the loss is personal for everyone. Billy states simply, "A town that loses its children loses its meaning." Certainly, he is also saying that his family has lost its meaning, but his emotional investment in the town enables him to comprehend that everyone in town has suffered a loss. People in the town, including Billy, refer to them as "our" children. Although he struggles to find a way to deal with the loss of his children—the last survivors of his immediate family—he simultaneously mourns the death of the other children. He comments that "when my son and daughter and so many other children of this town were killed in the accident, I could no longer believe in life." Standing before the bus, he says, "I don't know why I was there, staring with strange loathing and awe at this wrecked yellow vehicle, as if it were a beast that had killed our children and then in turn been slain by the villagers." As he looks at the bus, he imagines all the children inside, and remarks, "I wanted to be with them in death, with my children, yes, but with all of them, for they seemed at that moment so much more believable than myself was, so much more alive."

The town's sentiments are expressed by only two of the narrators, Dolores and Billy. Examining why the other two narrators are unable to comment about the loss in the same way lends additional insight into why the loss is so significant to the town. Mitchell never seems to understand the community's loss because he is an outsider. That he comes from a big city like New York, where terrible things happen to people every day, further distances him from being able to grasp the importance of this loss to this town. In New York, he might read about a tragedy in the newspaper and feel badly for the victims, but he is not personally affected by it. His frame of reference is too different from that of his clients to understand the full ramifications of the school bus accident. Nichole has an idea of the importance of the tragedy, but she herself is a child and thus lacks the scope that the adults have. She is a typical teenager who is caught up in her own immediate world of school, friends, and dances. While she loves Sam Dent, she is not yet old enough to appreciate its past and future. She is sympathetic to the families as individuals (for example, she feels deep sorrow for Billy), but she lacks the maturity to sympathize with the town as a whole.

In the last chapter, Dolores brings the loss of the children into sharper focus. She is a lifetime resident of the town and knew the children personally. She also understands the more abstract importance of the children as the future of the community. Clearly, she is haunted by the accident, and her own memories of that day, coupled with her resolve to stay in Sam Dent, outweigh the town's chilly reception of her and her husband. Even after Billy reveals what Nichole claimed in her testimony (that Dolores was driving over the speed limit), Dolores's feelings about the accident are anchored in her experience rather than in the town's misunderstanding of her role in it. She muses on the importance of children to the community:

The accident had ruined a lot of lives. Or, to be exact, it had busted apart the structures on which those lives had depended—depended, I guess, to a greater degree than we had originally believed. A town needs its children for more than it thinks…. A town needs its children, just as much and in the same ways as a family does. It comes undone without them, turns a community into a windblown scattering of isolated individuals.

In the wake of such damage to a community, it is little wonder that some people choose to stay in denial and others choose to move to other towns. Sam Dent will never be the same, and for some residents that reality is unbearable. Billy, despite having lost his entire family, finds a way to stay in Sam Dent. His choice to drink excessively, however, indicates that his life is as permanently damaged as his community is. His choice to stay in a town that holds painful memories supports Dolores's comment that the community is like a family. Now a widower with no children, Billy stays with the only family he has left. Dolores is able to remain committed to the community, even if its future has become less secure. She is flexible enough to continue life in another town, but she does so without really becoming a member of the new community. She works there, eats there, and runs errands there, but she still lives in Sam Dent. She possesses the clarity to understand that her position in the town has changed, but she accepts this. She says:

All of us—Nichole, I, the children who survived the accident, and the children who did not—it was as if we were the citizens of a wholly different town now, as if we were a town of solitaries living in a sweet hereafter, and no matter how the people of Sam Dent treated us, whether they memorialized us or despised us, whether they cheered for our destruction or applauded our victory over adversity, they did it to meet their needs, not ours. Which, since it could be no other way, was exactly as it should be.

The town has lost fourteen of its children, and some residents have moved to other towns to begin new lives. Still, many residents, like Dolores, Billy, and Nichole, are committed to staying. The future of Sam Dent is uncertain, but there is hope that it will survive because of the residents who suffered from the accident yet are unwilling to give up on the future of their town, just as they would never give up on the future of their families.

What Do I Read Next?

Banks's first critically acclaimed novel, Continental Drift (1985), is considered by many to be his most approachable novel. It is the story of Bob Dubois, who wants to create a better life for himself. In telling the story, Banks demonstrates how individual lives are deeply affected by unseen forces, such as the drifting of the continents.
Pete Dexter's National Book Award-winning Paris Trout (1988) is the tragic story of the murder of a fourteen-year-old African-American girl in a small southern town. Dexter shows how this horrifying event affects the community and local race relations.
William Faulkner's acclaimed As I Lay Dying (1930) uses the same narrative techniques that Banks uses in The Sweet Hereafter. It is the story of a poor southern family on a journey to take their mother's body to be buried.
Robert Niemi's Russell Banks (1997) is an installment in the Twayne's United States Authors Series, which offers readers in-depth information about authors' backgrounds, careers, and works. Niemi's study also includes analysis of Banks's writings, including a discussion of his experimental efforts.

Source: Jennifer Bussey, Critical Essay on The Sweet Hereafter, in Novels for Students, The Gale Group, 2002.

Donna Rifkind

In the following review, Rifkind provides an overview of The Sweet Hereafter and calls the story's final image "a heart-stopping passage."

"Gritty", "muscular" and "vigorous" are the words most commonly used to characterize the writing of Russell Banks, whose blue-collar American tragedies have earned him big prizes and teaching positions in leading American universities. Much of the grit in Banks's work comes from autobiographical sources. The heroes of Continental Drift (1985) and Affliction (1989) hail from the same kind of wintry, disintegrating New Hampshire town in which he himself was brought up. His father, an alcoholic plumber, was surely a model for the abusive father in Affliction. And the seedier parts of Florida, where Banks lived for a time, serve as settings for Continental Drift, and for some of the short fiction in Success Stories (1986).

Banks's latest novel, The Sweet Hereafter, has no apparent autobiographical basis. The story, which is based on several real-life news items, begins in a snowstorm with a full school bus descending a hill in the fictional town of Sam Dent, in upstate New York. When the bus swerves, smashing through a guard rail and plunging into a sandpit filled with icy water, fourteen of the thirty-four children in the bus are killed.

Once one knows that this novel is going to be about dead children—and Banks doesn't waste any time making this clear—it is very difficult to keep reading. Yet the author's sympathetic imagining of the events following the accident is so skilful and complex that one is compelled to continue.

His technique is to provide a series of testimonies by the following characters: the bus driver, a woman of sterling character named Dolores Driscoll who sustained no physical injuries; Billy Ansel, the father of two of the dead children; Mitchell Stephens, a slick New York City lawyer looking for a lawsuit; and one of the survivors, a beautiful fourteen-year-old cheerleader named Nichole Burnell whom the accident has left paralysed and wheelchair-bound.

The point of these testimonies is not to display discrepancies in shifting points of view. In fact, Banks's motive here is just the opposite. Each character takes up the action where the previous one left off, avoiding both corroboration and argument; the result is to make everyone appear more and more alone in their grief. "A town needs its children, just as much and in the same ways a family does", says Dolores Driscoll. "It comes undone without them, turns a community into a windblown scattering of isolated individuals."

This is precisely what happens in the months following the tragedy: marriages break apart, friends turn against each other, respected citizens retreat into perpetual drunkenness. As one of these, the former local hero Billy Ansel, comments: "it was as if we, too, had died when the bus went over the embankment and tumbled down into the frozen water-filled sandpit, and now we were lodged temporarily into a kind of purgatory, waiting to be moved to wherever the other dead ones had gone."

No healing or redemption seems possible here, partly because the town has no one to blame. Dolores, who had been driving the bus safely and responsibly for twenty years, is more or less beyond reproach (though some refuse to see it that way), and her anguish over the event leaves permanent emotional scars. The New York lawyer, after stirring up some initial support for a lawsuit, finally goes away disappointed, for the hard truth is that this catastrophe was villainless: it was a cruelly whimsical event, beyond control.

This fact, and Banks's subtle handling of it, are what lift the novel up out of ordinary gritty realism toward something approaching the sublime. After the bus crash, there are two communities in the town of Sam Dent, as Dolores notes at the novel's end: "All of us—Nichole, I, the children who survived the accident, and the children who did not—it was as if we were the citizens of a wholly different town now, as if we were a town of solitaries living in a sweet hereafter, and no matter how the people of Sam Dent treated us, whether they memorialized us or despised us, whether they cheered for our destruction or applauded our victory over adversity, they did it to meet their needs, not ours."

The book's final image, of a county fair seen from a distance, manages to unite these two sets of citizens in a heart-stopping passage, one that reaches for the same painful beauty as the end of Joyce's "The Dead" or parts of Thornton Wilder's Our Town. It is Russell Banks's last, best word on the subject: that not even art may be able to explain or redeem the unspeakable event that wrecked this town, but it can at least try.

Source: Donna Rifkind, "A Town Divided," in Times Literary Supplement, April 17, 1992, p. 20.

Chuck Wachtel

In the following review, Wachtel compares elements of The Sweet Hereafter to Banks's other novels, asserting that Banks "brings his passionate and profoundly exact craft to bear."

Because The Sweet Hereafter is smaller in both scope and page count than Continental Drift and Affliction, Russell Banks's last two novels, it offers an opportunity to see more easily what is central to the power and importance in his work: the ability to write about ordinary people (most of us) without accepting much apparent guidance or influence from the existing literary manners of doing so, or from the common assumptions of our times.

If not for the effects of the failing national economy, the tentacles of mass media and the upscale vacationers who drive north from the city, the small, upstate New York town of Sam Dent, setting of The Sweet Hereafter, would otherwise remain isolated in its own particular late-twentieth-century solitude. On a recent winter morning a schoolbus skids off the road, tumbles down an embankment and into a water-filled sand pit. Fourteen of the town's children are killed. The fabric of order in Sam Dent is suddenly torn apart. The novel does not present this in public acts of mourning or violence; there are few overt acts of vengeance or compensation. Rather, we experience the horror, the uncontainable pain, in the voices of the novel's four narrators, who in the aftermath of the accident present to us not only themselves and the facts as they know them; they also present to us the mysterious and inevitable continuance of their lives.

For the most part, their stories remain inside the perimeters of local, more immediate circumstances. As they tell those stories, increasing our access to their inner lives, the characters do not readily give themselves over to larger, universalizing proportions: We must first experience them in their own terms—their ordinary moments, their revelations—before we respond with the secondary wave of our understanding. Lionel Trilling has given us a still very serviceable phrase for what realism in fiction does, or should do: reveal the human fact in the veil of circumstance. Central to the power of nearly all of Banks's work is that he is first influenced by his subject matter, the people he writes about. In their context the larger issues become less abstracted, less the possession of idea—more theirs, more ours.

Early in Continental Drift (1985), for example, its two main characters, a New Hampshire furnace repairman and a poor, young Haitian woman, escape the lives they were born to and begin separate, haphazard, perilous migrations toward more viable, safer, more comprehendable [sic] lives. Although the narration remains centered in the movements of these two characters, it expands in size to encompass the unnavigated drift that seems to be so much of life at the end of this half-millennium we might remember as Columbian America. Affliction (1989), set in New Hampshire, is the story of the events leading up to a murder and the disappearance of the man who commits it. It is also a story about the legacy of male anger—from its un-traceable beginnings in a time long before the world that this novel occurs in was ever dreamed of—and its effects on family, community and the culture at large. If it is possible for writers to contain such vast thematic centers in their stories, and if readers are still willing even to attempt to accept delivery of them—in short, if this is to work at all—what is needed is precisely what Banks provides: characters who can be perceived as wholly separate from the conditions their stories make manifest.

As Dolores Driscoll, the bus driver and narrator of the first and last of The Sweet Hereafter's five sections, begins telling her story, the circumstances begin to narrow, to close in around her like a reversal of the circular eddies caused by a stone dropped in water. Dolores has driven the children of Sam Dent to school since 1968, when the bus was her own Dodge station wagon and her own two sons were among the passengers. In the nearly two decades that follow, her husband and companion, Abbott, becomes confined to a wheelchair due to a stroke, making her driver's income the household income; her sons grow up and move on; and the station wagon, which she and the children had named Boomer, is replaced first by a GMC twenty-four seater and, in 1987, "to handle the baby boomers' babies, I'd guess you'd call them, the district had to get me the International fifty-seater."

The second narrator, Billy Ansel, is already widowed when the accident occurs, taking the lives of his two children. A Vietnam vet, owner of a garage, he is a man possessed of a quiet and isolate integrity. He tells us that people who have lost their children "twist themselves into all kinds of weird shapes in order to deny what has happened. Not because of the pain of losing a person they loved—we lose parents and mates and friends, and no matter how painful, it's not the same—but because what has happened is so wickedly unnatural, so profoundly against the necessary order of things, that we cannot accept it."

Mitchell Stephens, Esq., a lawyer who comes up from New York City hoping to represent the families and survivors, is the book's third narrator. Angry, sophisticated, observant, he provides an outsider's view of the other characters and of Sam Dent. In telling us of his own life, particularly as the father of a hopelessly drug-addicted daughter, he places the novel, the accident itself, in the larger, darker context of our times. He tells us we are all losing our children: "I don't know if it was the Vietnam war, or the sexual colonization of kids by industry, or drugs, or TV, or divorce, or what the hell it was; I don't know what are causes and what are effects; but the children are gone … So that trying to protect them is little more than an exercise in denial."

Young Nichole Burnell, a survivor of the accident, has already been forcibly extracted from the fabric of her teenage life by her father, who victimizes her through incest. Outwardly a pretty, popular eighth grader, she lives isolated in an inexpressible silence. The accident, condemning her to a wheelchair for life, completes the process: When we meet her all the connections—to family and friends, to the series of events she had expected to carry her into the future—have already been severed. Nichole is the book's fourth narrator, both a child and a prophet. Hers is perhaps the deepest, clearest view we get into the inner life of Sam Dent.

As readers, caught up in the life of the novel, we make a leap from our burdened and mysterious real lives to something we perceive in the heart of its characters. We seek, and perhaps find, a kind of communion with something larger. Yet since a character is, after all, simply a construct of crafted language, most of what we find there, as in a dream, has to have been ours in the first place. What we seek is ourselves. Yet the life we live and the lives we read about in so many contemporary novels seem to have less and less in common.

In explaining why the storyteller has become a thing of the past, Walter Benjamin told us, "One reason for this phenomenon is obvious: experience has fallen in value." Since he wrote this, the trend has accelerated. Even the complex technologies of fiction we've been steadily evolving since Chekhov cannot keep apace of this devaluation. I see in much of Banks's work a refusal to find this acceptable. Whether vast or local in scope, the foundation for his fiction is experience in its most familiar and simultaneously mysterious circumstance: as we know it, be it, before it is crafted into the larger, rarefied context of fictional narrative. We can find it there.

This realism exemplified by Russell Banks is both old-fashioned and new. New because his characters feel as if he first discovered them outside of fiction, not from pre-existing literary or cultural models. Old-fashioned because his work is dedicated to what Cynthia Ozick has called (in a wonderful brief essay, "A Short Note on 'Chekhovian'") "explicit and definitive portraiture and the muscular trajectory of whole lives."

In the final section of The Sweet Hereafter, Dolores Driscoll is watching the demolition derby at the Sam Dent County Fair. The town has shunned her since the accident six months ago. On one side of her, her husband sits in his wheelchair; on the other is Billy Ansel, drunk, the state he has most often been in since the accident. Boomer, now the possession of one of the town's young men, is one of the entries. The crowd cheers each time Boomer is hit. The other drivers, understanding the town's desire to punish the car, to punish Dolores, attack with fury. Even so, the old car prevails. As, one by one, the other cars are eliminated and the process intensifies, the crowd begins chanting "Boomer! Boomer!" The whole town has crossed an invisible border. Although things will never be the same, its inhabitants have touched, perhaps only briefly, some source of their collective lives, one that was there before the accident and, through this time of grief and anger, has somehow remained intact. There is, however, no consolation for Dolores Driscoll, no going back:

Nichole, I, the children who survived the accident, and the children who did not—it was as if we were the citizens of a wholly different town now, as if we were a town of solitaries living in a sweet hereafter, and no matter how the people of Sam Dent treated us, whether they memorialized us or despised us, whether they cheered for our destruction or applauded our victory over adversity, they did it to meet their needs, not ours. Which, since it could be no other way, was exactly as it should be.

The book's narrative does not go beyond this dark, grim time in the life of its characters, yet it offers us a healing clarity. I think this is because these characters, or the human facts they represent outside of fiction, are the first measure of the story's size and shape. And it seems only after taking that initial measurement that Russell Banks, in The Sweet Hereafter, brings his passionate and profoundly exact craft to bear.

Source: Chuck Wachtel, "Character Witness," in Nation, Vol. 253, No. 21, December 16, 1991, pp. 786-88.