“Gritty”, “muscular” and “vigorous” are the words most commonly used to characterize the writing of Russell Banks, whose blue-collar American tragedies have earned him big prizes and teaching positions in leading American universities. Much of the grit in Banks's work comes from autobiographical sources. The heroes of Continental Drift (1985) and Affliction (1989) hail from the same kind of wintry, disintegrating New Hampshire town in which he himself was brought up. His father, an alcoholic plumber, was surely a model for the abusive father in Affliction. And the seedier parts of Florida, where Banks lived for a time, serve as settings for Continental Drift, and for some of the short fiction in Success Stories (1986).

Banks's latest novel, The Sweet Hereafter, has no apparent autobiographical basis. The story, which is based on several real-life news items, begins in a snowstorm with a full school bus descending a hill in the fictional town of Sam Dent, in upstate New York. When the bus swerves, smashing through a guard rail and plunging into a sandpit filled with icy water, fourteen of the thirty-four children in the bus are killed.

Once one knows that this novel is going to be about dead children—and Banks doesn't waste any time making this clear—it is very difficult to keep reading. Yet the author's sympathetic imagining of the events following the accident is so skilful and complex that one is compelled to continue.

His technique is to provide a series of testimonies by the following characters: the bus driver, a woman of sterling character named Dolores Driscoll who sustained no physical injuries; Billy Ansel, the father of two of the dead children; Mitchell Stephens, a slick New York City lawyer looking for a lawsuit; and one of the survivors, a beautiful fourteen-year-old cheerleader named Nichole Burnell whom the accident has left paralysed and wheelchair-bound.

The point of these testimonies is not to display discrepancies in shifting points of view. In fact, Banks's motive here is just the opposite. Each character takes up the action where the previous one left off, avoiding both corroboration and argument; the result is to make everyone appear more and more alone in their grief. “A town needs its children, just as much and in the same ways a family does”, says Dolores Driscoll. “It comes undone without them, turns a community into a windblown scattering of isolated individuals.”

This is precisely what happens in the months following the tragedy: marriages break apart, friends turn against each other, respected citizens retreat into perpetual drunkenness. As one of these, the former local hero Billy Ansel, comments: “it was as if we, too, had died when the bus went over the embankment and tumbled down into the frozen water-filled sandpit, and now we were lodged temporarily into a kind of purgatory, waiting to be moved to wherever the other dead ones had gone.”

No healing or redemption seems possible here, partly because the town has no one to blame. Dolores, who had been driving the bus safely and responsibly for twenty years, is more or less beyond reproach (though some refuse to see it that way), and her anguish over the event leaves permanent emotional scars. The New York lawyer, after stirring up some initial support for a lawsuit, finally goes away disappointed, for the hard truth is that this catastrophe was villainless: it was a cruelly whimsical event, beyond control.

This fact, and Banks's subtle handling of it, are what lift the novel up out of ordinary gritty realism toward something approaching the sublime. After the bus crash, there are two communities in the town of Sam Dent, as Dolores notes at the novel's end: “All of us—Nichole, I, the children who survived the accident, and the children who did not—it was as if we were 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 us or despised us, whether they cheered for our destruction or applauded our victory over adversity, they did it to meet their needs, not ours.”

The book's final image, of a county fair seen from a distance, manages to unite these two sets of citizens in a heart-stopping passage, one that reaches for the same painful beauty as the end of Joyce's “The Dead” or parts of Thornton Wilder's Our Town. It is Russell Banks's last, best word on the subject: that not even art may be able to explain or redeem the unspeakable event that wrecked this town, but it can at least try.