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All the way through reading The Sweet Hereafter (1991) by Russell Banks I was haunted by the feeling that I'd read it before. It's feasible I've seen the 1997 movie, I suppose; yet this wasn't a matter of my having dim recollections of the story (the book in fact doesn't have a huge amount of main-narrative story) but one of my recognizing all sorts of bits and pieces of the storytelling ephemera as they appeared, as well as the book's general ambience. Anyway . . .
A school bus crashes in a small northern New York State town, and a dozen kids die. Through the narratives of four of the people involved (the bus driver, the sole witness, the would-be avenging lawyer, the cheerleader kid who survives but with permanent disability) we're told of the tragedy and its aftermath. And we're told a whole heck of a lot else as well, as the four characters fill in their backstories.
One pleasing aspect of all the backstory infill is the way we discover that each of these people differs, sometimes in very major ways, from the person others have constructed based on false assumptions about them: the local hero and fine, upstanding man is in reality conducting an adulterous affair -- that sort of thing. At the same time, though, the constant deviation from the main story dulls any thrust which that story might have had until, by the final chapter, I found myself growling "For &%$#'s sake, get on with it!" a few times.
Overall, the book gets about five out of ten from me. The writing's quite nice, despite the occasional howler (". . . Hartley said in a voice that sounded the way a sheet of blank paper looks" might work quite well in a Chandleresque piece, but here makes the eyes bulge in disbelief), and, when not irritated by it, I found the swirling lack of focus fairly entertaining. What I never felt, though, were the horror of the accident's aftermath and the grief of those left behind, and I think Banks intended me to feel those things.
A school bus crashes in a small northern New York State town, and a dozen kids die. Through the narratives of four of the people involved (the bus driver, the sole witness, the would-be avenging lawyer, the cheerleader kid who survives but with permanent disability) we're told of the tragedy and its aftermath. And we're told a whole heck of a lot else as well, as the four characters fill in their backstories.
One pleasing aspect of all the backstory infill is the way we discover that each of these people differs, sometimes in very major ways, from the person others have constructed based on false assumptions about them: the local hero and fine, upstanding man is in reality conducting an adulterous affair -- that sort of thing. At the same time, though, the constant deviation from the main story dulls any thrust which that story might have had until, by the final chapter, I found myself growling "For &%$#'s sake, get on with it!" a few times.
Overall, the book gets about five out of ten from me. The writing's quite nice, despite the occasional howler (". . . Hartley said in a voice that sounded the way a sheet of blank paper looks" might work quite well in a Chandleresque piece, but here makes the eyes bulge in disbelief), and, when not irritated by it, I found the swirling lack of focus fairly entertaining. What I never felt, though, were the horror of the accident's aftermath and the grief of those left behind, and I think Banks intended me to feel those things.
