Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Banks, Russell - Howard Frank Mosher (review date 8 September 1991)

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Howard Frank Mosher (review date 8 September 1991)

SOURCE: Mosher, Howard Frank. “The Lost Children.” Washington Post Book World 21, no. 36 (8 September 1991): 3, 14.

[In the following review, Mosher praises the accessibility of Banks's characters and narrative in The Sweet Hereafter, calling the novel “Banks's most accomplished book to date.”]

A nobleman once asked a Chinese philosopher to bestow a blessing on his family. The famous scholar reflected briefly. Then he said, “Grandfather dies, father dies, son dies.” When the nobleman indicated his distress, the philosopher shrugged his shoulders. “What other way would you have it?” he said.

Of course, any alternative to the natural progression of life and death from one generation to the next seems nearly unthinkable. Yet it's exactly such a tragic reversal of human mortality that Russell Banks confronts in The Sweet Hereafter, his latest and best...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. Howard Frank Mosher (review date 8 September 1991)
   2. Jeff Danziger (review date 24 September 1991)
   3. Donna Rifkind (review date 17 April 1992)
   4. James Finn Cotter (review date 2 May 1992)
   5. Ross Leckie (essay date summer 1994)
   6. Richard Eder (review date 21 May 1995)
   7. Ann Hulbert (review date 29 May 1995)
   8. Penelope Mesic (review date 11 June 1995)
   9. Phil Baker (review date 30 June 1995)
   10. Brian Morton (review date 7 July 1995)
   11. Ed Peaco (review date fall 1995)
   12. Jerry Herron (essay date fall 1996)
   13. Robert Niemi (essay date 1997)
   14. Henry Mayer (review date 8 March 1998)
   15. Russell Banks and Christine Benvenuto (interview date March-April 1998)
   16. Alfred Kazin (review date 9 April 1998)
   17. Lawrence Hill (review date 13 April 1998)
   18. James M. McPherson (review date May 1998)
   19. Joyce Appleby (review date 22 May 1998)
   20. Russell Banks, Robert Faggen, and Barry Munger (interview date summer 1998)
   21. Millicent Bell (review date fall 1998)
   22. Paul Binding (review date 15 September 2000)
   23. Kathleen Snodgrass (review date spring 2001)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright