Recipe for Russell Bank's Sweet HereafterIngredients required17 dead teenagers and little kids2 living teenagers 1 bus1 bus driver (female) 1 river1 roadTwenty-five large scoops of ice and snowFour bags of bad weather (can be found at most supermarkets)1 small townApprox 35 parentsReporters (a handful will do)2 lawyers1 oz morality10 oz sentimentality1 box soapflakes4 boxes KleenexMethodSprinkle the ice and snow on the road. Tilt the road 25 degrees, with the edge of the road close to the edge o...

When is lying acceptable? Or even an act of heroism? Banks answers: when it is for the common good.Writing-wise, there is nothing special in this book. The prose is simple, readable and sometimes even boring. There are a few meaningful verses but none that can be gleamed as original or hits you really hard. However, what's lacking in verse is adequately augmented by the thought-provoking questions that this book opens to the reader and in the end, offers answers as well.When is an accident an ac...

A remarkable and remarkably simple piece of literature that spawned a remarkable movie.Russell Banks, Russell Banks, Russell Banks. If I write his name enough it might conjure a complete sentence from my mind, as though his name alone might rub some of his magic off on me and I could explain this novel to you. Russell Banks. It's not working. I just read Affliction which a truly incredible movie was adapted from, adapted so well that it seemed to make the novel a non-event for me, yet I knew tha...

The conclusion gives us an incredibly powerful image to end this, an almost impossible tale to tell. The awful tragedy in itself is not committed to the page, but the aftereffects are clear, the emotions are not hinted at but fully disclosed. I don't know if I was very much convinced that there are four DISTINCT characters, since they are so alike. I feel like a great bulk of the book was not told, not actually given to us the way it was supposed to: like evading a grand central question. Yeah,

I've been meaning to read Russell Banks for a very long time. Affliction had been on my Goodreads to-read list since I joined in 2008. As I had snubbed it time and time again, I ultimately removed it from my list.Then, after recently listening to Nancy Pearl's That Stack of Books podcast, my interest was renewed with her enthusiasm for The Sweet Hereafter. I loved that movie. I still can't help but hear Sarah Polley's haunting version of the Tragically Hip's Courage whenever it's brought up. So,...

Whenever I read this book, I find myself wishing I'd read it before seeing the movie. No matter how hard I try, I find that I just can't shake those visuals, and I'd like to try to read the book on its own terms.Having said that, I love both the book and the movie, for reasons I'm not sure I can explain. The movie was actually one of the first DVDs I ever bought, at a time when DVDs were still kind of magical, and I watched it backwards and forwards. I listened to the commentary tracks; I watche...

I first read Russell Banks because I found out that he wrote the books that two great movies are based on, "The Sweet Hereafter" and "Affliction." The first of these two is an exquisite movie. In fact, and one doesn't often hear this, especially on Goodreads, but the movie is better than the book. In the movie, directed by Atom Egoyan, the story of a school bus in a upstate NY town going into the lake is dealt with in the aftermath. Most of the children of the town are dead, and lawyers show up,...

This one seemed to have a lot of potential. The idea was good. The story was… good. Or it could have been. I hated the way it was written. I didn’t like this fellows style at all. None of the characters came off as especially likeable, or real, or endearing, or brave… or anything. There was nothing stand out of the four people in the town chosen to narrate. Their story was sad, something stand out in itself. And perhaps that was meant to be the meat, that was meant to be all that stood out. But

This book taught me more about how to write than almost any other book I've read. The last chapter is a remarkable tour de force.

This is a terribly moving, insightful, and masterfully written novel, the best of the several I have read by Banks -- who is a superb writer.

"Newtown" (which as well as now being synonomous with a horrible tragedy, is also the name of a sleepy, quaint 300 year old New England town a few miles from where I went to high school) got me thinking about this book. I read it many years ago, but it affected me deeply at the time. After I saw the film (which is one of those rare adaptations that may almost eclipse the novel), I read the book and could not stop thinking about either for days. I had the book group I was running at the time read...

This is my first sweet taste of the Russell Banks experience. Well, it's a solid and evocative exposure that made this reader feel like he had spent a long time in the town getting to know the people. Insightful perspectives from the viewpoint of several characters, all presented in the form of smooth, seemingly effortless writing. Brilliant. If all his novels are like this I can see what the fuss is about.4.5 stars.

Huh. This book reminded me of the movie "Crash" --- it had that same feel of being a moving and at times heart squashing view of different people's lives and the way they come together to misunderstand each other. At the same time, it's very different than Crash because the central conflict or story is this bus accident and how people grapple with it. The writing was good, and at times the words were profound and very insightful. On the whole, I liked the book and I'm glad I read it. I wouldn't

I loved the structure of this book as well as the writing.The story is told by four different people who are in some way connected to the accident, and there are four parts or chapters, one for each, then a final chapter. What I thought was clever was that even though they are all talking in first person about the accident, the story ends up being chronological - the bus driver describing the morning of the accident up until it just starts to happen, the father who is in a car following the bus

The goodreads blurb for this says: "Atom Egoyan's Oscar-nominated The Sweet Hereafter is a good movie, remarkably faithful to the spirit of Russell Banks's novel of the same name, but Banks's book is twice as good." It has been a while since I read the book or saw the movie, but I'd say this assessment is kind of backwards. Banks's book is good, but the movie is a masterpiece. I should revisit both soon.

Honestly just felt kinda meh about this one? None of the characters felt particularly real to me, and the plot wasn’t really there? Disappointing

This book blew me away with its beautiful writing, many layers of story and the credible tension that Russell Banks was able to create out of such a simple premise, in fact it almost reads like a mystery. Banks writes in such a way that he opens up the small town of Sam Dent and deposits you right in the middle of it leaving you feeling as if you personally know all the characters or might have once lived there yourself. It is also an interesting character study and from my experience realistic

I meant to pick up "The Reading Group" for a light change of pace after "Nickel and Dimed," but I had to take Naava to the pediatrician who often discusses literary fiction with me (he reads a lot of the same books I do, but in Hebrew translation) and I was embarrassed to come in with a fluff book. What can I tell you; we all indulge our vanity where we can. Meanwhile, after a 1.5 hour wait in the waiting room I'm too into the book to put it down now. "The Reading Group" will have to wait. Updat...

In his attempt to write a philosophical novel, Russell Banks sacrifices character development, plot and engaging writing. In his attempt to tell the story of people coping with a shared tragedy, he sacrifices philosophy. The resulting disaster is a barely readable story told by four different people, often with the characters overlapping and repeating events to the reader - sometimes even lifting dialogues word for word from previous chapters - instead of moving the story forward. Perhaps if Ban...

Couldn't put it down--an exploration of grief and how different individuals and the impacted community respond to and attempt to make sense of a terrible tragedy. Loved the way Banks tells it from four connected perspectives.

My new pick for worst book I've ever read!Sorry Jim Morrison's Adventures in the Afterlife you have been dethroned!

Four narrators describe life before and after a tragedy in their small Adirondack town. Dolores Driscoll, a straightforward woman who is the breadwinner & caretaker of her husband, was driving the school bus when it went over the cliff. Billy Ansel, a respected Vietnam veteran, local businessman, and father of two, is driving behind the bus as he waves goodbye to his children inside. Mitchell Stevens is a lawyer from New York City who comes up to try to "help" the parents of the town sue the "pe...

Banks's writing is easy to read. His prose is conversational, and any first person narrator he inhabits sounds real. I believe the voices he uses. I believe them as people. Whether I believe the facts of any of the plots in his books is another question, but one that is rich and interesting to ponder.Still, the two books of his I've read have broken my heart. I'm not running out to the store to buy the rest of his catalog. I'm old and haggard and jaded enough as it is.The Sweet Hereafter gives u...

Sam Dent is a small town where not much happen. This changes in one horrific event. Banks explores how or if we can ascribe blame and if truth can be ascertained. But it is not a philosophical novel. Instead, the exploration plays out through four different viewpoints: the bus driver who is directly involved in the tragedy, a father who loses two children, a lawyer from a big-time firm in New York who believes there are never accidents, and a young middle school girl who was injured in the "acci...

At first I did not like this book, only because it is sort of misleading in the beginning. Despite the crash, the book seemed innocent enough until the perspective changes and suddenly sexual affairs, drugs, and rape are discussed without any warning. Once you realize that this book, even though it's central focus is on a crash and how it affects a town, covers a broad selection of topics you will start to enjoy it. The characters were very interesting and made the story. Also I'm always a sucke...

This short little book took me over 2 weeks to finish - I savoured it to the last page and made sure I could read it undisturbed and without any interruptions. The writing is stellar, the characters are flawlessly developed and multifaceted, and I really enjoyed the story being broken up into different narratives.It's one of the saddest books I've ever read, but also one of the most beautiful ones.

I had to read this for a writing class. The book was bad, the class was bad, I tried to watch the movie but it was too dull to get through. There just wasn't anything in the story worth reading about.

A modern masterpiece. A tour de force of point of view and characterization. The story is quite tragic, but so well rendered and psychologically cogent. Internal and beautifully constructed and written novel.

To start off, a disclaimer: I do love genre fiction. As even a brief look through my reviews will show you, my reading spreads out very far afield indeed, and I enjoy pretty much every type of fiction as well as quite a lot of non-fiction. Still, the kind of fiction that I love the most, that is closest to my heart, is literary fiction; and there are reasons for that which go beyond personal preference. (And, another disclaimer, I’m of course well aware that there are exceptions, that there is g...

This story felt so incomplete . It started of pretty good but just went downhill after the first chapter. The mentioning of Billy Ansel and his affair was not useful to the plot. Neither was the relationship and conflict between the lawyer and his daughter. I expected to read more about the case for whether it was an accident or if someone or something was to blame and the book just never addressed enough. The lawyer was there in one or two chapters and instantly it was over with no explanation....