posted on 13 Apr 2020

The Sweet Hereafter by Russell Banks

Perhaps if I had had a better recollection of Russell Banks’s formidably good novel, The Sweet Hereafter, I might have chosen to read it at a different time and in different circumstances, for the fact of the matter is, novels about catastrophic loss of life in dreadful traffic accidents are not the best choice of reading in the middle of the worst health crisis in decades.

But anyway, that is what I did. I pulled The Sweet Hereafter from the shelves in desperation, really: everything I had read over the past few weeks seemed to have failed in one way or another, but I was also increasingly aware that the real problem was me – I wasn’t concentrating; it seemed pointless to be reading books when there was such a torrent of ever-worsening news to keep up with.

But it is precisely in such circumstances that being able to refresh our minds and spirits by immersing ourselves in other things is crucially important. And I remembered that when I first read Banks’s 1991 novel, I had been hugely impressed by it. It was worth a try.

In fact, my recollection was very poor. What I had remembered was only really its surface qualities – that it is that rare thing, an American novel that is both small-town and blue collar, and has no concern with literary trends or perhaps even the world of literature. What I had forgotten is that it is an audaciously imagined novel of enormous emotional power, almost flawlessly executed.

It opens on the morning of the 27th January 1990, although I don’t think this becomes evident until the very final pages of the book. In the small, blue collar town of Sam Dent in upstate New York, Dolores Driscoll, who cares for her disabled husband, is out in the early morning darkness as she begins the long route to pick up the town’s schoolchildren in the orange school bus she drives and has driven for many years. The bus slowly fills with the town’s children. Dolores knows them all. She knows the families they come from and she knows the circumstances of those families. She knows the poor and the precariously employed; the secret drinkers and the not-so-secret; the long, happy marriages and the unhappy. She knows those who have for various reasons risen above the harsh circumstances of their lives. Billy Ansell, for instance, the Vietnam vet and lone parent of twins whose wife died a year or two earlier from cancer.

Billy’s is one of the voices we will come to know intimately, for the story that follows that morning drive is told by four uniquely different narrators: Dolores, Billy Ansell, Mitch Stephens, an out-of-town lawyer, and Nichole Burnell, a fifteen year-old girl. But within these four differing perspectives there is a polyphony of other voices and a small town’s-worth of vivid, believable, precisely drawn characters.

As the bus fills on that January morning, the weather worsens – not dreadfully, but it is icy and a light snow begins. The weather and the mountain roads and the surrounding wilderness are tangible; you can almost smell the cold, you can hear the wind soughing in the green-black trees, the pines and great cedars and redwoods. In circumstances that will be endlessly argued over, Dolores’s faultless record of safety is broken: the bus slides from a hill-top road, breaches the fragile barrier and plunges down the hill and into the black, icy waters of a disused, flooded quarry. Fourteen children die.

What follows is the story of how this small township responds to this appalling tragedy – the lives it ruins, those it somehow brings together, the division and disruption, and – crucially – the class-action lawsuit that the lawyer Mitch Stephens attempts to construct and which further divides this small grieving community. And, of absolutely central importance, the reasons why this lawsuit is eventually abandoned.

That, in a nutshell, is what this extraordinary novel is about – and I am aware that it doesn’t sound like cheery reading. And it isn’t. But nor is it vicariously gruesome. The whole thing is done with gravity and extraordinary dignity and such finely balanced restraint that I defy anyone to read it and find it tasteless or exploitative. And to achieve this while also, within each narrative, unfolding further subtle layers of drama and grief and personal circumstance seems nothing short of miraculous.

This was Banks’s seventh novel. Those that came before it are not terribly well known, I don’t think, and those that have come after it – including the mammoth Cloudsplitter, about the abolitionist, John Brown – don’t have the extraordinary poise and realism of this mid-career novel, which surely by any definition is the achievement of a lifetime.

For very understandable reasons, you may not wish to read The Sweet Hereafter right now. But if you have never previously encountered Russell Banks’ work, and especially if you have never read this particular novel, do make a mental note to read it at some point. There is no facile salvation in it, no spurious, unearned solidarity; no easy message of hope or healing, and moreover no didactic purpose. It feels like reading the truth. And the final section, conducted against the backdrop of the town’s annual fair and the roar and clamour of its traditional closing demolition derby – a sort of stock-car contest of destruction – where Dolores Driscoll has an epiphany of sorts, is almost literally heartstopping. I have never read anything quite like The Sweet Hereafter and I’m glad I thought of rereading it.

 

Alun Severn

April 2020