The Sweet Hereafter

Steven Lehman teaches English at John Abbot College in Montreal.

This is the story of a school bus accident in a small, upstate New York
town. The survivors are set upon by a number of slick, ambulance-chasing
lawyers. Primarily through the courage of a young girl, who has become a
paraplegic because of the accident, the town survives both misfortunes.

Four characters provide the narration. In general they are well
developed and their actions spring from credible motivations.
Occasionally, however, their reflections wander into curiously inflated
phraseology, betraying the deadpan tone so effectively used throughout
the book to characterize the aftermath of tragedy.

The almost perfectly structured plot is eviscerated in the last quarter
as Banks shifts the thematic focus. The young heroine turns out also to
be a victim of incest and the school bus accident actually rescues her
from that predicament. The driver of the bus emerges as a lonely,
Bogart-like Christ-figure whose good name is sacrificed for the
integrity of the community.

The Sweet Hereafter hovers on the edge of pathos, but it never tumbles
into abject sentimentality. Banks transcends the tragedies he describes
purely through the penetrating power of his intensely focused
perception. Anything smacking of religious consolation is eschewed, if
not decried. The epigraph from Emily Dickinson is validated in the end
to the effect that “nothing is the force that renovates the World.”