The Sweet Hereafter by Russell Banks

First published: 1991

Type of plot: Psychological realism

Time of work: The late 1980’s

Locale: Sam Dent, New York

Principal Characters:

• Mitchell Stephens, a New York lawyer who specializes in representing accident victims
• Nichole Burnell, a paralyzed teenaged survivor of a school-bus accident
• Billy Ansel, a Vietnam veteran, widower, and father of twins killed in the bus accident
• Dolores Driscoll, the bus driver who survives the accident, which kills fourteen children

The Novel

The Sweet Hereafter dramatizes the emotional impact of a school-bus accident on the injured survivors, the families of the victims, and the people of the small mountain town of Sam Dent, New York. A multitude of lawsuits accuse everyone politically connected with the town, the school board, or the school administration of responsibility for the accident, and the town of Sam Dent, initially united in its grief, is divided by the litigation. In order to examine the cause of the accident, the author offers several perspectives of people directly involved with the accident.

Dolores Driscoll, the bus driver, says she that thought she saw a dog through the snow-blinded windshield and swerved to avoid hitting it. How this slight movement was sufficient to send the bus over a guardrail and down a steep incline until it rested on a water-filled sandpit covered with thin ice is beyond her comprehension. Instead of addressing the immediate circumstances, she relates her history of safe driving and loving concern for each child boarding her bus. Influenced by her stroke-debilitated husband, Dolores refuses to sue anyone.

The perspective of a grieving parent and the only witness of the accident is provided by Billy Ansel, who followed the bus every day to wave to his motherless children. However, deep in his thoughts, he noticed nothing different before the bus left the road. Because of his Vietnam War experiences, Billy accepts death as inevitable; therefore, he believes that no one was responsible for the accident. Believing the lawsuits are irrevocably dividing a formerly closeknit town, Billy urges the parents who support one lawsuit—the Walkers, the Ottos, and the Burnells—to drop it so that healing can begin.

Another narrator, Mitchell Stephens, would seem to provide an outsider’s objective viewpoint, but his personal past and his professional interests as a lawyer soon obviate that expectation. His expertise persuades some parents that greed is not the object of a civil suit; rather, the paying of damages will force those responsible to be more careful in the future and thus prevent repetition of accidents and further loss of life. Stephens blames contemporary society as a whole both for the bus accident and for his own daughter’s drug addiction.

Beautiful, talented, fourteen-year-old Nichole Burnell, a paralyzed survivor of the crash, seems to be the most obvious victim and the one most in need of money to provide for her medical expenses. Although her father seems to dote on her, providing a ramp and a first-floor bedroom to facilitate her movement, flashbacks reveal his sexual abuse. Overhearing the respected Billy Ansel begging her parents to drop the lawsuit and feeling that her own family has also been divided by it, Nicole at her deposition falsely testifies that Dolores was speeding at 70 miles an hour at the time of the accident. Her testimony destroys any case against the state and school board.

Dolores Driscoll, unaware of Nichole’s damaging false testimony, takes her invalid husband to the Demolition Derby held at the County Fair. The neighbors of a lifetime turn away from her and refuse to help her with the wheelchair. She learns about Nichole’s deposition from a drunken Billy Ansel. However, when the car she formerly owned wins the competition, the townspeople respond positively and express their momentary forgiveness by carrying her husband down the steps. Although both victims and survivors of this tragic accident will live forever in the “sweet hereafter” of their shared grief, the author offers a brief reconciliation via the battered car’s symbolic resurrection.

The Characters

Russell Banks makes characterization central to his theme in his examination of the impact of a trauma on the lives of ordinary people. Expressed in the first-person point of view, each narrative begins with a statement that immediately strikes a tone offering an important insight into the speaker’s character. By using parallel treatment of the characters, the author highlights their differences, differences that explain—at least to the reader, if not to the other characters—their different reactions to the tragedy of the bus accident and their decisions either to support or reject the lawsuit.

Dolores Driscoll, the bus driver, begins, “A dog—it was a dog I saw for certain. Or thought I saw.” The bewildered, anxious tone established by these contradictory words is continued throughout what sounds like a response to an interviewer’s questions. The interviewer, though, is Dolores’s conscience, responding to her own anxiety and to what she knows others must be thinking: that her negligence caused the accident. She provides a personal history of loving care for others: her sons, her invalid husband, the children on her bus. However, her last words describe the bus accident as she experienced it. Regardless of her refusal to accept responsibility for the accident, Dolores knows that fourteen children died in a bus she was driving.

Billy Ansel, a Vietnam veteran, a widower, the father of twins killed in the accident, and the only person to witness the accident as it occurred, believes it to have been unpreventable; he is angry with anyone who offers reasons for the accident, especially anyone who is pursuing a lawsuit. However, his description of himself as the strong, silent type is undermined by his withdrawal from society to drink.

Mitchell Stephens, the cynical, successful New York lawyer, has an angry tone that expresses his professional viewpoint: Someone has to pay for the pain suffered in life. Flashbacks to his own daughter’s childhood are punctuated by her drug-addicted urgent pleas for money, explaining his feeling that the physical loss of a child may not be more difficult than the spiritual loss of one.

Nichole Burnell, the paralyzed teenaged survivor, introduces her account with an ironic statement: “The mind is kind, Dr. Robeson told me. . . .” The statement is ironic because while the doctor is referring to her inability to remember anything about the bus accident, her mind is obsessed with the memory of her father’s frequent past sexual abuse. This ironic tone is maintained when, during a deposition to support her parents’ lawsuit, she pretends to remember the cause of the accident. Even though Nichole knows that she is hurting her own financial future by undermining the lawsuit, she prefers vengeance against her father; he realizes her motive too late.

Critical Context

Russell Banks’s early postmodern novels—Family Life (1975) and Hamilton Stark (1978)—were followed by somewhat more conventional realistic ones, although The Book of Jamaica (1980) and The Relation of My Imprisonment (1983) continued to experiment with point of view and open endings. Although these early works received respectful critical reviews, they failed to attract the general readership. Continental Drift (1985), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1986, marked a turning point in Banks’s writing career. With this realistic work, he created the ordinary characters struggling to make something of their lives who have since then constituted his literary signature.

Although Russell Banks initially read about an actual accident involving a school bus in the newspapers, these articles only provided a framework on which he could pursue some lifelong interests and themes. The child of a blue-collar family, the author personally experienced the difficult personal and economic challenges of the ordinary characters depicted in this work.

In an interview, Banks admitted to being “really interested in reinventing the narrator” because he believes the convention affords the writer a closeness to the characters and their stories that he does not otherwise have. This interest in experimenting with a narrator follows in the tradition initiated by Henry James, who believed the dramatic mode created by using a character’s changing thoughts and feelings to be the most effective way of holding the reader’s interest and providing psychological insights.

However, the central influence on Banks’s theme that fate can be cruel regardless of a person’s merits seems to be naturalism and its proto-authors—Theodore Dreiser, Frank Norris, and Stephen Crane.

Because these universal themes continue to challenge the human race, the artist in every generation must address them and express them in a style that will speak to the contemporary reader’s sensibility. Both the critical and the general reader praise Russell Banks for fulfilling this need.

Bibliography

“All Lost Children.” Review of The Sweet Hereafter, by Russell Banks. Economist 321, no. 7729 (October 19, 1991): 104. This review suggests the novel is concerned with both the physical loss of children in the accident and the moral loss of children’s innocence represented by the drug-addicted daughter of the lawyer handling lawsuits against the civil authorities.

Banks, Russell. “The Search for Clarity: An Interview with Russell Banks.” Interview by Trish Reeves. New Letters 53, no. 3 (Spring, 1987): 44-59. Banks remarks that although he does not see himself as a political activist, he tries to depict people of lower economic status as having as much complexity as the more affluent.

Cotter, James Finn. Review of The Sweet Hereafter, by Russell Banks. America 166, no. 15 (May 2, 1992): 391. Cotter asserts that the remote location and cold climate of the town of Sam Dent mirror the lives of the townspeople after the bus crash.

Vandersee, Charles. “Russell Banks and the Great American Reader.” The Cresset 53, no. 2 (December, 1989): 13-17. Although Vandersee is interpreting Continental Drift (1985) and Affliction (1989), his analysis of these two works clearly distinguishes Banks’s overall artistic contributions to the American novel, for example, his historical approach linking the present with the past.

Wachtel, Chuck. “Character Witness.” Review of The Sweet Hereafter, by Russell Banks. The Nation 253 (December 16, 1992): 786-788. As the title of his review suggests, Wachtel bases his evaluation of Sweet Hereafter on Banks’s ability to create ordinary characters who are independent of literary models and social expectations.