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The Sweet Hereafter by Russell Banks
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The Sweet Hereafter (1991)

by Russell Banks

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Showing 1-5 of 22 (next | show all)
I have to say I enjoyed the first half of this book more than the second half. I really liked the narrative switch from the bus driver to the Billy Ansel character, the way the latter picked up the plot from roughly the same spot but from his own perspective, putting a new spin on the people of the town and the events. However, I was disappointed with subsequent narrative shifts because the latter narrators back-tracked a bit. Also, the "new spin" was lacking in those characters; they just gave a differing perspective, not really one that shone new light on the situation or people so much. Also, some of the minor storylines sort of get dropped when Nicholle takes narration, which (I feel) disjoints the novel. And in general the story gets a bit boring towards the latter half.

But the content, the aftermath of a school bus accident that kills so many young children, is an interesting topic that is not used in many novels. If you have young children or recently lost a loved one to an auto accident, you may not be interested in this book, however. ( )
  LDVoorberg | Apr 7, 2013 |
The Sweet Hereafter is the story of a school bus accident which tears a small town apart. Told from the perspective of four different characters, the plot is interesting and the method Banks uses to propel the story is very effective.

I struggled with the voices of the characters too much, however. The bus driver, the New York City lawyer, the owner of the service station, and the fourteen year-old victim--their stories are all told in a similar voice, a very professional one. And, as such, I didn't find them believable.

Based on this story, Banks has a decent grasp on the art of fiction, but the whole thing falls apart when he tries to get into his character's voices. Unfortunately, this causes the whole work to unravel. ( )
  chrisblocker | Mar 30, 2013 |
Wonderful quick read told in the voice of 4 of the characters each giving their unique perspective how a school bus accident changed their lives. This is a 1991 book but may well be worth checking out other works by this author. March 2013 ( )
  eembooks | Mar 18, 2013 |
Whenever I read this book, I find myself wishing I'd read it before seeing the movie. No matter how hard I try, I find that I just can't shake those visuals, and I'd like to try to read the book on its own terms.

Having said that, I love both the book and the movie, for reasons I'm not sure I can explain. The movie was actually one of the first DVDs I ever bought, at a time when DVDs were still kind of magical, and I watched it backwards and forwards. I listened to the commentary tracks; I watched the documentaries. Nowadays, who has time for that kind of investment in a flimsy plastic disc?

But the book. Four different narrators, each distinct and fully realized. The back of the book describes it as a "morality play," but the book lacks the obviousness suggested by such a label. Morality, of course, is an issue in the book, but it's not presented in stark right-or-wrong terms. My judgements of each of the characters changes with each read. Is Mitchell Stephens a crusader or a lawyer? Is Nicholl courageous or naive? Is Billy capable of seeing the world clearly, or are his decisions invalidated by the grief which has destroyed him?

All in all, it's a lovely book, translated into an equally lovely movie. I can't recommend either highly enough, and I wish I could find the eloquence to explain why. ( )
1 vote jawalter | Nov 18, 2012 |
I think I'd like to see the movie, since several have good things to say about it. The author has a good feel for voices....all the narrators are distinctly different. The tales they tell are packed into a fairly small "space" without taking a breath. I think it might have benefited from a little more space between thoughts and paragraphs. Still, a good story, fairly well told. This is an early book....I'm going to try something more recent. ( )
  PermaSwooned | Sep 2, 2012 |
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Epigraph
By homely gift and hindered Words
The human heart is told
Of Nothing—
"Nothing" is the force
That renovates the World—

Emily Dickinson (#1563)
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for Chase
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A dog—it was a dog I saw for certain.
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Amazon.com Amazon.com Review (ISBN 0060923245, Paperback)

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.

(retrieved from Amazon Thu, 14 Apr 2011 15:16:59 -0400)

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