In The Sweet Hereafter Russell Banks evokes the terror that seizes a small community in the north of New York State, as it is brusquely deprived of its children and future, as a consequence of a school bus accident. Terror infiltrates the novel in private and communal forms. Indeed, while both victims and witnesses are made to test their shattered attachment to life, the community to which they belong experiments diverse large-scale survival strategies. Yet despite the fact that the situation underlying it is painfully fraught with pathos, the novel is characterized by an extreme, somehow paradoxical, restriction. The state of shock that is described is paralleled by Bank’s blank writing and by the white landscapes he depicts, winter, cold and snow figuring the characters’ stupor while freezing time and the violence of emotions.
