Give thanks then all around.

The Sweet Hereafter
Russell Banks

I don't know how Russell Banks manages to keep The Sweet Hereafter from veering into extreme depressitude territory; it's the story of a small town that loses most of its middle and elementary school aged children in a grisly school bus accident. But...he does. Is it because the book is called "The Sweet Hereafter?" Is it as simple as his editor telling him that he needs to reference some sort of afterlife in the title, and use a positive modifier for it, so that we don't all rush out and kill ourselves upon reading it? And if it is that: did I fall for it?

Banks tells his story by having four people who are affected by the accident respond to it, and their changed positions in the town. Delores Driscoll, the bus driver, must deal with the blame and guilt of an entire town, even while she blames herself. Billy Ansel, a widower, has lost his twin daughters and is the only member of his family left standing. Mitch Stephens, an attorney who tries to convince the residents of Sam Dent to sue, has a troubled relationship with his own drug-addicted daughter. Stephens is resting his negligence case on Nichole Burnell, the thirteen year old who, out of all the other children, survived the crash. Nichole was a cheerleader, a good student, the town sweetheart, and she's paralyzed from the waist down, now. Stephens is expecting that she'll look good to a jury, and tug their heartstrings, but the more we get to know Nichole the more we learn that her life before the accident was maybe not the pretty picture that her lawyer is painting of it.

Another author who handled this story might not have done it with such subtle treatment, and I think that this subtlety is a large part of why I didn't want to put my head in the oven upon reading it. Banks keeps a curious strand of numbness running through the book: despite her part in the tragedy, Delores doesn't have time to whoop and gnash her teeth, because she has to care for her invalid husband. Billy Ansel, though he is mourning his daughters, is still obsessed with the affair he was carrying on with his married neighbor before the accident. Nichole, though she should be grateful to have survived, is pissed that she can't walk anymore, and angry at her parents trying to pimp her out for damages. All this could seem heartless if handled by a less skillful writer, but Banks's message is clear: life doesn't stop because something terrible happened. It goes on and on and on.

You also get the sense that the characters are telling this story at some remove from their tragedy--years and years later, and that helps, too. Time has taken them out of the situation, has made it seem like a thing that happened to someone else. It doesn't hurt so much when you think of an event as just one particular bad event in a string of things that happen to you in your life, that are happening, and will happen. I'm glad Banks has given us this distance, because to put us too close to it would have been devastating, and that's not the story Banks wants to tell. This book isn't a requiem for the children who've died, it's the epitaph of a country town, a close-knit community, that was dying before the accident; that was thoroughly and permanently dismantled after. "A town that's lost its children has lost its meaning."

I really don't have anything to nitpick about this book. Yes, at times I felt that the characters were too cavalier about this awful tragedy, but that's the way it really would be, wouldn't it, nine times out of ten? We're evolutionarily conditioned to play down horrible things and pick up and keep going, in situations like this. Otherwise you just have to stop, sit down by the road, and give up. It's the sackcloth and ashes that we so often find in novels about great loss that's a bit unrealistic, and it has no place in this moving, human story. People cross through fire but they always come out on the other side. They pick up. They move on. The living go on living, despite everything they've lost.

Rating: 4 of 5 stars.