Sweet Hereafter: A Novel by Russell Banks - Wish I had read this first...

Atom Egoyans Oscar-nominated The Sweet Hereafter is a good movie, remarkably faithful to the spirit of Russell Bankss novel of the same name, but Bankss book is twice as good. With the cool logic of accreting snowflakes, his prose builds a world--a small U.S. town near Canada--and peoples it with four vivid, sensitive souls linked by a school-bus tragedy: the bus driver; the widowed Vietnam vet who was driving behind the bus, waving at his kids, when it went off the road; the perpetually peeved negligence lawyer who tries to shape the victims heartaches into a winning case; and the beauty-queen cheerleader crippled by the crash, whose testimony will determine everyones fate.

We experience the story from inside the heads of the four characters in turn--each knowing things the others dont, each misunderstanding the facts in his or her own way. The method resembles Faulkners The Sound and the Fury and Gilbert Sorrentinos stunning Aberration of Starlight, but Bankss achievement is most comparable to John Updikes tales of ordinary small-towners preternaturally gifted with slangy eloquence, psychological insights, and alertness to lifes tiniest details.

Egoyans film is haunting but vague--it leaves viewers in the dark regarding several critical plot points. Bankss book is more haunting still, and precise, making every revelation count, with a finale far superior to that of the film. Its also wittier than the too-sober flick: the lawyer dismisses the dome-dwelling hippie parents of one of the crash victims as being lost in their Zen Little Indians fantasy, which casts a sharp light on them and him, too. Hes lost in his calculations of how each parent will fit into the legal system, and the ways in which he fits into the tragedy are lost on him. If only he and the Vietnam-vet dad could read each others account of their tense first encounter, both of them might get what the other is missing.

Bankss wit is pitiless--its painful when we discover that the bus driver, who prides herself on interpreting for her stroke-impaired husband, is translating his wise but garbled observations all wrong. The crash turns out not to be the ultimate tragedy: in the cold northern light of its aftermath, we discover that were all in this alone.

Wish I had read this first...
I rented the movie the Sweetheafter, and found it haunting. I had many questions about characters and wanted to go deeper, so I picked up the book. I was not disapointed. Just as the schoolbus crash in the movie will always be with me, so will more of the characters, and their personal stories.

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