The Sweet Hereafter

Written by Russell Banks

Narrated by Dawn Harvey, Chris Andrew Ciulla, Dominic Hoffman and Jesse Vilinsky

""Rich in imagery and the detail of small-town life and haunting in its portrayal of ordinary men and women struggling to understand loss. Under Mr. Banks's restrained craftsmanship, what begins as the story of senseless tragedy is transformed into an aspiring testament to hope and human resilience."" — Atlanta Constitution

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?

Here is a stunning novel of ""compelling moral suspense"" (Los Angeles Times Book Review) from one of America's greatest storytellers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperAudio
• Release date: Oct 27, 2020
• ISBN: 9780062955180

Russell Banks

Russell Banks, twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, was one of America’s most prestigious fiction writers, a past president of the International Parliament of Writers, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His work has been translated into twenty languages and he received numerous prizes and awards, including the Common Wealth Award for Literature. He died in January 2023 at the age of eighty-two.  

Reviews for The Sweet Hereafter

[khiemstra631 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I was forced to read this book for a book discussion group in which I assist. And, I must say, the book did generate good discussion so if that's what you have in mind, this one will work fine. The plot revolves a school bus accident that killed several children from the town of Sam Dent, NY, as well as leaving one paralyzed from the waist down. Several narrators give their perspective on it, including the first and last chapters by the bus driver. It was interesting to see how her views of the events changed. A worthwhile read.

[eembooks · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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

[abirdman_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A deeply imagined book takes a flinty-eyed examination of a town and characters involved in the aftermath of a tragedy. Banks maintains a nearlly intoxicating level of sadness, and uncovers the dignity, courage and humanity in even the most flawed characters. If there's a message here, it's that we all share in a tragedy that befalls our community. This was made into a good movie, but do yourself a favor and read the book first. A good cry can be redeeming.

[isabelx_21 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

It's a while since I read this book, but I remember enjoying it.

[permaswooned · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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.

[clydethehero · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

not his best.

[howifeelaboutbooks · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is the story of a school bus crash in a small town. It's also told from multiple points of view, including the bus driver, the father of a dead child, one of the injured children, and an ambulance-chasing lawyer. Obviously this meant each character had an entirely different spin to put on the story. I really enjoyed this book because it was an interesting concept and was well-written, but my favorite part was the emotional factor. There wasn't really one. In most cases that would be something to complain about, but here it was imperative. How easy would it be to get swept up in the tragedy of losing so many school-aged children? The book could have been a big sob-fest, forcing sentimental mush on the reader. While the tragedy isn't glossed over, Banks gently turns our focus to how the town is coping.

[ladymink_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Loved the way this was written. It's more like 4 short stories all in this one small town, everything revolving around a shared tragedy. Had to read it for college lit, but was pleasantly surprised.

[ocgreg34 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The day didn't begin with much snow, but Dolores Driscoll knew it would grow in strength as the morning wore on. She'd driven the children of Sam Dent to and from school for years, in both good and bad weather, so she understood the potential dangers of the snow. That day, something surprised her in the road, she veered off course and over a the drop into Jones Brook.Told from the points of view of four different characters, "The Sweet Hereafter" examines a small town as it attempts to cope with the loss of so many lives and who to blame for such an act. Dolores Driscoll recounts the morning of the school bus accident; Billy Ansel was following the bus, watching his children as the contentedly rode to school; Mitchell Stephens, Esq., smells a lawsuit in the air and wants to be the one to gather the folks of Sam Dent into a army of victims; Nichole Burnell, a young girl now bound to a life in a wheelchair, is the one person upon whom the future of the town lies. It's remarkable storytelling, delving into the darker side of small-town life, with each of the characters surviving his or her own tragedies, separate from the accident, and yet they still find the strength to rise above something potentially even more devastating than the accident itself. A fantastic book.

[nefernika · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This is the only time I've cried while reading about a demolition derby. Fantastic use of multiple narrators to nuance and enrich this story of unimaginable tragedy and how accountability, blame, money, law, and guilt each comes into play in different ways from different perspectives.

[shankarmony-969641 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is a beautiful and masterfully written book. Banks employs multiple narrators in a way quite unlike other writers, and the story is set up to move along at just the right pace. Devoid any excessive sentimentality, while writing about a near-unspeakable tragedy in a small town, he does a terrific job of sketching the various townfolk of a small by-the-side town in upstate New York. The people seem real, the emotions seem real and there is nary a false note. Highly, highly recommended

[davidabrams · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I broke the rule when I read "The Sweet Hereafter." You know, the old rule of folks like me who love books and movies in equal measure: always read the book first because the suits in Hollywood have a way of mangling literature. It’s happened recently with "Les Miserables," "The Scarlet Letter" and, most horrifically, "A Prayer For Owen Meany" (which came to the screen as "Simon Birch").But "The Sweet Hereafter" was different for me. I’d heard so many good things about the movie that I couldn’t wait to see director Atom Egoyan’s vision of Russell Banks’ novel about a school bus accident and its shattering effect on the people in a small town. The movie did not disappoint. It was a great example of good film storytelling, revealing complex characters with a minimum of Hollywood gloss and formula. I was very moved by "The Sweet Hereafter" (the movie).So, when I came to "The Sweet Hereafter" (the book) several months after watching the movie, I had high expectations. Russell Banks did not disappoint, either. In fact, he goes the film one better (as all great books do) by delving into the heart and mind of a character the film pushes to one side: the driver of the school bus.The novel begins and ends with Dolores Driscoll, the forty-something woman who was behind the wheel of the school bus when it skidded off the road one winter morning and plunged into a reservoir. In the book, Dolores is a sympathetic character; we feel her overwhelming grief and guilt over the accident which killed 14 of the town’s children.Banks is smart to begin "The Sweet Hereafter" with Dolores’ voice. Not only does it orient us to the basic details of the accident, it also immediately polarizes our sympathies for the woman. As the town gradually comes to blame her for what happens, it is heartbreaking since (through the eyes of Dolores, at least) we know it was truly an accident, not negligence. By the end of the novel, Dolores has been almost completely ostracized and there is a heartbreaking scene at the town’s annual demolition derby that will crumble even the most jaded reader. The rest of the novel is like an overture building to this one powerful scene at the derby where Dolores feels the eyes of the town on her as she carries her crippled husband up into the grandstands. By the time Dolores has found her seat, there won’t be a dry eye in the house. (Interestingly enough, it’s also a scene which never made its way onto the screen.)Dolores is just one of four characters who, through their own voices, tell the story of the accident. There’s also Billy Ansel, a loving father of two who was following the school bus when it smashed through the guardrail. And Mitchell Stephens, the city lawyer who invades the town like "a heat-seeking missile" before the 14 bodies are even buried. And Nichole Burnell, the high school’s most popular girl who was paralyzed in the accident.Four distinct voices, four versions of the events—it’s like interviewing traffic accident witnesses who stood on four different corners. Each character brings along enough emotional baggage to keep a psychiatrist booked for years to come. As in the movie, the most compelling and chilling story belongs to Nichole whose secret is even more shattering than the bus accident itself.How these lives intersect and intertwine is part of Banks’ mastery. He’s been good before ("Rule of the Bone," "Cloudsplitter"), but here he is great, achieving a true peak in his career as a teller of stories which have a profound effect on the reader. "The Sweet Hereafter" (the movie) was so good because, I think, it had such a firm foundation: "The Sweet Hereafter" (the novel). No matter which medium you choose, I guarantee you won’t walk away from the story unmoved. "The Sweet Hereafter" haunts.

[russellbittner · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

(I should say right up front that what I’ve just read is an “Advance Reading Copy” of The Sweet Hereafter and not whatever eventually made it into bookstores. Did I miss anything? I don’t know, even if the same HarperCollins-published edition is supposedly three pages longer here at Goodreads.)


“Nothing. Except that his tongue came out and licked dry lips. Then I recognized it: I’ve seen it a hundred times, but it still surprises and scares me. It’s the opaque black-glass look of a man who recently learned of the death of his child. It’s the face of a person who’s gone to the other side of life and is no longer even looking back at us. It always has the same history, that look: at the moment of the child’s dying, the man follows his child into darkness, like he’s making a last attempt to save it; then, in panic, to be sure that he himself has not died as well, the man turns momentarily back toward us, maybe he even laughs then or says something weird, for he sees only darkness there, too; and how he has returned to where his child first disappeared, fixing onto one of the bright apparitions that linger here. It’s not a pretty look; it’s downright spooky” (p. 102).


Out of context, this paragraph may not sound like much. In context, it can ruin your day … give you nightmares … take with it the last peaceful evening you’ve ever spent … if you’re now a parent.


If you’re not, I’m not sure. Maybe it wouldn’t mean much.


I haven’t read anything like The Sweet Hereafter since John Fowles’s The Collector, back in the sixties – which could well say more about me as a reader of current literature than about Russell Banks as a writer of the same. In any case, I’ll risk saying that this novel is sui generis. Four distinct voices; and all four, authentic (at least to this reader’s eyes and ears). Quite an accomplishment – and something very few writers (once again, in my limited experience) know how to do well.


Apart from a stylistic tour de force, Russell Banks accomplishes a psychological study par excellence. I have rarely read – then consequently seen, felt, smelled – four characters as sharply as I did the four in The Sweet Hereafter. You may not like some of these four. But believe me: you won’t forget any of them anytime soon.


And the story? Yes, the story is harrowing – but not told without a dollop of humor now and again. Without that occasional narrative lagniappe, I’m not sure I could’ve made it to the end.


But I did, and can now highly recommend this novel – my first of Russell Banks’s, but certainly not my last.


One additional citation – and this one from the bus driver:


“That done, though, I kept myself away from all town functions, church affairs, meetings, bake sales, and so forth, and more or less oriented myself west and south, faced our life towards Lake Placid, where I had to take Abbott twice a week for his physical therapy, anyhow. Naturally, I no longer drove the school bus – two weeks after the accident, the school board mailed me a certified letter saying my services were no longer required, but I had already made that decision for myself, thank you. And since Eden Schraft never called me, the way she usually did, about carrying the mail in the summer months, I gave that up, too; a bit more reluctantly, however, than I gave up the bus, for I had no terrible associations with that particular job. Now, whenever I saw one of those big yellow International school buses on the road, I simply had to look away or else concentrate on a single detail, like the sum of the numbers on the number plate or the poker hand the numbers made, until the thing was gone from view” (p. 223).


Welcome to America, the Land of Opportunity – where the roads are all paved in gold, and which “can be an interesting town (country) when you see it from a tourist’s perspective” (p. 223).


By way of conclusion, I’ll cite Banks’s own conclusion: a small-town demolition derby – an apt metaphor, I assume, for the larger story. I’ll risk a further assumption – namely, that ‘Boomer’ (the last car standing in the derby, and which formerly belonged to the ill-fated bus driver whose thoughts I cited above) might well signal a generation just a ‘derby’ or two away from posterity and the grave. If my assumption is correct, Banks’s inspired choice is a trope I’d like to quietly applaud.


RRB
05/30/14
Brooklyn, New York, U.S.A.

[wordygirl39 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A good book. I used to make my creative writing students read it and would always put it on any list of fiction a writer should read.

[jawalter · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

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.

[dysmonia · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Excellent book, well-written; wasn't expecting to be blindsided by a sexual abuse angle 2/3 of the way through.

[voracious_reader_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Well-written, but lifeless. The novel creates sweeping depictions of a rural, impoverished and largely isolated town in the New Hampshire mountains. Four characters narrate versions of a school bus crash and its aftermath and their stories overlay and intersect with one another. Although each character has a very different voice, the book just oozes gloominess no matter who is speaking. Given the subject matter of the book, that's not entirely suprising; still, it's just dark on top of dark on top of darker. Also, many if not all of the characters are very difficult to like even once we understand them. I liked the movie better; it has feeling that the book lacks.

[josephj_530382 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Not the best of Banks that I have read so far, but a compelling read nonetheless. He plays with the idea of truth and perspective by having multiple narrators give their opinion as to what really happened the day Sam Dent bus driver, Dolores Driscoll, lost control of her school bus. All but a handful of kids die. Who is to blame? Is blaming anyone fair?The only downside to this novel, which wasn't so bad I guess, is that I wanted to know a little bit more about the people who narrate the book because they were all so very interesting. I also wanted to hear from a few of the other people mentioned in the book who aren't given a chance to speak.

[sturlington_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is one case where I thought the movie version surpassed the novel, perhaps because I saw the movie first and it moved me so deeply. But the novel, in its wrenching account of a tragic school bus accident in a small town and the changes it wreaks in the four point-of-view characters, is enthralling, and it succeeds in really letting us inside the characters’ heads in a way the movie could not do.

[engpunk77 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Journal entry 1 by cmjuliep from New Hartford , New York USA on Monday, February 20, 2006

Definitely a worthwhile read. I had seen the movie years ago and of course, the book was way better. I did think the use of the "Pied Piper of Hamlin" in the movie was poignant but the portrayal of Nicole and her relationship with her father was contradictory to the feelings that motivate her in the book. I also didn't quite understand the lawyer's motivations when I watched the movie, and now he's quite clear. I was most affected by the ending of the novel (not part of the movie for obvious reasons), so I'm glad I took the time to read it.

[ldvoorberg · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

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.

[jtho_3 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

It's the story of a small town shattered by a bus accident that kills half of the children in the town, but what makes this a great read is the characterization. Each chapter is told from the perspective of someone else affected by the crash, and the voice of each one is so real and so unlike the others. We get such a deeper understanding of the accident and its effects through these different perspectives, and are sympathetic towards characters we might otherwise hate. It's an amazing book.

[chrisblocker · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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.