The Sweet Hereafter
By Russell Banks
HarperCollins, 257 pages, $20
Like Andre Dubus, Raymond Kennedy, Bobbie Ann Mason, Jim Harrison and a few other writers, Russell Banks specializes in Third World America, the real uncharming Lake Woebegones of our society, the little towns that even TV forgot until recently and that it now threatens to change into cutesy/weird Disneyland versions of themselves-Winesburg, 1991.
These are the places like the town called Sam Dent, way to hell and gone up in the 6-million acre Adirondack Park in upstate New York, places full of
”patched-together houses with flapping plastic over the windows and sagging porches and woodpiles and rusting pickup trucks and junker cars parked in front, boarded-up roadside diners and dilapidated motels that got by-passed by the turnpike that Rockefeller built for the downstate Republican tourists and the ten-wheeler truckers lugging goods between New York City and Montreal”-all of this seen by the skiers blowing by in a swirl of dry powder in their toasty BMWs and Saabs and Porsches on the way to Lake Placid or Whiteface.
Mainstream America forgets all about such places until a school bus goes off a mountain road in the dead of winter, and then it sends ”a TV crew from the NBC affiliate in Plattsburgh . . . headed by a blond woman in tights and leg warmers and a leather miniskirt who kept shoving her microphone at people`s gray faces, asking them what they were feeling. As if they could say”-what they felt about 14 of their kids being dead and others maimed when the big yellow bus careened through a guardrail and sank through the ice of a frozen-over sandpit one snowy January morning.
But then the little town that Time forgot remembers the role it`s supposed to be playing-hell, they get Newsweek, they`ve watched ”Twin Peaks”; what else is there to do up there till the summer people come?-and all hell breaks loose.
”It`s amazing,” thinks the hotshot negligence lawyer Mitchell Stephens as he cruises north in his Mercedes, smelling blood, ”how poor people who live in distant beautiful places always think that a six-lane highway . . . will bring tourists who will solve all their problems, when inevitably the only ones who get rich from it live elsewhere. . . . Money that comes from out-of-town always returns to its source. With interest. Ask an African.”
Ask Mitch. He`s one of four first-person narrators who tell this sad, mordant but magically redemptive tale of what happens when a town loses its children-one thing that happens being the realization that the children were long gone anyway, that the accident didn`t so much change the town as open its eyes to the lives it was living.
”It`s like all the children of America are dead to us,” Mitch sourly notes. ”Just look at them, for God`s sake-violent on the streets, comatose in the malls, narcotized in front of the TV. In my lifetime something terrible happened that took our children away from us,” whether it was ”the Vietnam War, or the sexual colonization of kids by industry, or drugs, or TV” or all of the above, ”the children are gone, that I know. So that trying to protect them is little more than an elaborate exercise in denial,” and Mitch is there to make the most of it.
Like the other three narrators-like, perhaps, all of us in the Age of the Image-Mitch is a walking cliche with complications; that is, a good cover story plus possibilities for authenticity and change, the capacity to surprise and a full load of his own pain. He insists he`s not doing it for the money primarily, like the double-knit sharks who join him in the feeding frenzy, because he`s already made a lot of it. Having lost his own daughter to drugs and divorce, ”I`m on a personal vendetta; what the hell, it`s obvious.” Most of all, he fights for victims in order to keep from becoming one.
Another narrator is Billy Ansel, the Local Hero, the boy who volunteered for Vietnam, got a battlefield commission in the Marines, came home to marry his childhood sweetheart and run a successful auto-repair business that also specializes in rehabbing lost young Viet veterans-only to lose his wife to cancer a few years before their twins die in the bus. He comes to realize that the accident changed nothing, that he had been broken long before, maybe even before `Nam. The accident only catalyzes his ruination by plunging him further into drink, but not before he passes on his strength to someone who really does survive.
This is Nichole Burnell, age 14, and the third narrator. The beautiful Harvest Ball queen, cheerleader and everybody`s favorite babysitter who finds herself a cripple in a wheelchair, she is finally strong enough to bring an end to the secret hell that her churchgoing father had been inflicting on her for years, as well as to the litigious blight that Mitchell Stephens brought to Sam Dent and that threatens to drown the community in lawsuits and countersuits.
But first, and finally, there is the bus driver, Dolores Driscoll, a large woman (in all senses) in her late 50s who until the accident-until she saw, or thought she saw, that brown blur in the blowing snow in front of her headlights-supported her stroke-crippled husband Abbott by working for the school board, a job that evolved out of her own good nature in driving other kids to school along with her own. She becomes both victim and scapegoat, and aside from articulating the conscience of the town-what consciousness it has- with the book`s opening and closing narratives, is alone strong enough to assume both roles at once, and is the only local besides Nichole to resist Mitch`s promise of wealth and to do something about it.
Abbott, whom she considers a genius of oracular powers, is fond of telling her in the afflicted speech only she can understand that she has a sanguine personality, which she does. But it`s not saccharine, and never ever sentimental, and neither are those of the other narrators, whose pain-in Nichole`s narrative, for example-cuts like a laser through the pious self-delusion of those around them. All of them see well and describe with the total clarity of shock the events clustering around the fateful moment.
Dolores, for example, describing her final mission as a school-bus driver (she`s fired after the accident, despite no proof of culpability), notes that ”the talk of children can be very instructive” as she listens to ”the early-morning sounds of children practicing at being adults . . . arguing, making exchanges, gossiping, bragging, pleading, courting, threatening, testing-doing everything we ourselves do, the way puppies and kittens at play mimic grown dogs and cats at work.”
Billy Ansel, on a trip to Jamaica with his family the year before his wife`s death, tells us that his children, like all identical twins, ”have a morality that is different from ours . . . because, unlike other children, they are not inclined to imitate adults until much later. To a child who is a twin . . . the other twin is both more and less real that everyone else in the family, and they deal with each other the way we deal with ourselves alone. Which means it`s like twins are permanently stoned.”
Mitch Stephens, a city man, nevertheless gets the north country right:
” `Forest primeval,` I`m thinking. . . . This is not Bambi country. . . . It`s a hard place, hard to live in, hard to romanticize. But, surprisingly, not hard to love because it evokes this strange feeling of fear and awe . . . even in someone like me.”
And Nichole gets Mitch right, too: ”this tall skinny guy with a big puffy head of gray hair that made him look like a dandelion gone to seed. . . . He talked funny, fast . . . the way city people or maybe just lawyers do. But I liked it, because once you trust a person like that, you can have a real conversation with him.”
Banks is not pitch-perfect, however. The ”like I said” construction occurs too often even in Nichole`s speech, considering she`s an honor student, and is far too gratingly frequent even in Mitch`s, while on the other hand, Dolores sometimes speaks with improbable formality. But the people themselves, the personalities are totally distinct and believable, and Banks has shrewdly let his four narrators tell something new and unexpected on virtually every page, gradually filling in the emotional and textural details of an event that leaves its survivors ”the citizens of a wholly different town now, as if we were a town of solitaries living in a sweet hereafter, and no matter how the people of Sam Dent treated us, whether they memorialized or despised us . . . they did it to meet their needs, not ours. . . . We were absolutely alone, each of us, and even our shared aloneness did not modify the simple fact of it.”
Yet at the time Dolores is saying this, she and Nichole have both been reintegrated into the community, completing a cycle of sacrifice, suffering and renewal-symbolized comically but effectively enough by a demolition derby at the county fair.
Without sentimentalizing them in the least, Banks has extended the themes explored in his previous novels, most recently ”Affliction”-the crippling narrowness of smalltown life, of people forced to live mean lives in a pressure-cooker of despair that can lead to violent death, and the strangling embrace of the twisted family romance-to show that wiser, possibly even better people can emerge from the ordeal; that some old American decencies still prevail, against all the odds.
The paired symmetry of the two failed father-daughter relations-and especially the irony of the big-city lawyer who has failed his own child offering to repair a broken rural family with money and driving it further apart-deftly epitomizes the American dilemma at a cultural moment when we seem to have misplaced our future. As Dolores says, ”A town needs its children for a lot more than it thinks.”
