Customer Reviews
Meaning beyond blame - By: , 28 Jun 2002 
Mitchell Stephens, the admittedly angry New York City negligence lawyer from Banks' "The Sweet Hereafter" runs through a litany of societal problems that have caused a blinding fissure between generations. "We have lost our children," he says, & though he blames drugs & the "sexual colonization of our young people by industry," he is too logical to attempt to focus his anger at vague ideas. Instead, he mounts angry cases against the cities, counties & states from which the children disappear. We see that his true occupation is avoiding the sorrow & guilt he feels because of the "loss" of his own daughter.
When children are lost, parents are left in a sort of amoral timelessness, without history or perspective. The future disappears, & suddenly everything is permitted. The freedom is lonely & terrifying, & parents, in an attempt flee back to the world of rules & consequences, turn their grief outward where it mutates into blame.
But "The Sweet Hereafter" is more than an examination of grief & culpability. The novel investigates the communities that arise when anger & blame are the primary means of social currency. By the end of the book we find ourselves within questions much larger than the individual lives involved, & though we are sad that two characters must be martyred, we are relieved, because we know that martyrs couldn't exist without the morality we thought we'd lost. Even the martyrs find can solace in an understanding their of roles: they are proof of redemption.
The Sweet Hereafter was very entertaining and realistic. - By: , 01 Jun 1999 
The Sweet Hereafter was a book that I chose to read after I saw the movie. I liked the movie a lot & decided to give the book a try. It was very similar to the movie, but I think that the book was easier to follow. It was about a tragic accident in a smalll town. It goes through the process of healing & whos to blame for this accident. There are also some other twists that come about in this book. It showed how people tend to always have to put blame onto somebody when reallly it is nobody's fault. It also shows how a family can be ripped apart by a tragedy. When I started the book, I reallly did not want to put it down until I was finished. I liked the book a lot & think that if anybody is looking to read a easy to follow interesting book, this should be the one. The author is Russell Banks, he seems to be a good writer. I will probably try to read something else written by him.
Won't Let You Down! - By: , 31 May 1999 After a bus accident kills several children in a smalll town, everyone needs someone to blame. Russell Banks tells this story well by focussing on only a few characters & letting us get into their heads by way of switching narrators, among whom are parents of the dead children, a teenager who survived the accident, the bus driver, & a lawyer in town to get rich off of the accident. Banks is unwavering in his portrayal of immense grief & you feel by the end as though you personallly know the characters. I read this only after seeing the movie & was not disappointed
Great book - By: , 14 Apr 1999 A lot of other people have reviewed this book, probably better than I could do. I'll just add my two cents, it's a terrific book.
A Quick Lesson in Objectivity - By: , 14 Feb 1999 
Russell Banks has written a strange book that tells the tale ofa terrible school bus accident which kills 17 children from four different perspectives including: the bus driver, a survivor, the lawyer who tries to organize a suit, & one of the parents who fallls apart because of the incident. The story is griping, but it is not reallly about the children or their suffering. Rather it focuses on the adults & how they variously preceive the event. In some strange ways the book ignores the rfate of the children & tells a story of adults each in a separate world in which the children play a very smalll role. This is a strange introspective book, not my favoriate for the year, but interesting.
