The Sweet Hereafter

“Made you appreciate living here, instead of some milder place, where I suppose life comes somewhat easier.” 

Sam Dent is not an easy place to live. The inhabitants of Sam Dent struggle against the elements of the town itself in the winter and against widespread sociological problems like alcoholism, poverty, and abuse. Banks emphasizes that the people of Sam Dent were already struggling to cope with life before the accident ever occurred. They do not have the emotional and financial resources to deal with the tragedy. 

“Fixing motives is like fixing blame—the further away from the act you get, the harder it is to single out one thing as having caused it.” 

Banks describes how people generally understand and experience tragedy as an event that has clear cause and effect. The law, too, treats accidents and events as if they follow logical patterns and have clear causes. But here, Dolores recognizes that time only complicates one’s understanding of what occurred, and who was responsible. Dolores doubts herself and still struggles, almost a year after the accident, to understand what happened, including what she saw in the road. Even though the accident was momentous, Dolores does not pretend to know for sure whether she was to blame.

“[I]t was almost as if I were not present, or were invisible, or as if I were a child again myself, a child blessed or cursed (I’m not sure which) with foresight, with the ability to see the closing off that adulthood would bring, the pleasures, the shame, the secrets, the fearfulness. The eventual silence; that too.” 

Dolores highlights the honest, frank, and open discussion she observes between children who, unlike adults, do not hide their true feelings from one another. She also suggests that children mimic the behavior of adults and become who they are based on what they observe. This is one of many examples in which Banks explores the difference between children and adults and the unique value and importance of children in society, and in Sam Dent in particular. 

“[Children are] practicing at being adults [the] […] talk of children can be very instructive [because] they play openly at what we grownups do seriously and in secret.” 

In the first chapter, through the character of Dolores, Banks explores the role children play in society. Dolores realizes that the children behave as the adults around them do, and that the behavior is copied, rather than innate. This suggests that culture, more generally, is reinforced generation by generation and that children have a unique importance and role in perpetuating cultural norms.  

“Mourning can be very selfish. When someone you love has died, you tend to recall best those few moments and incidents that helped to clarify your sense, not of the person who has died, but of your own self.” 

Ansel is honest and direct about how his experiences with those he loved actually changed his perception of himself. Banks explores how characters define and understand themselves through their relationships with others. Ansel, for example, undertook and embraced the role of a father, but the deaths of his children stripped that identity from him. Ansel describes how his relationship with Lydia helped him know himself better, and this is similar to Dolores’ relationship with Abbott. Banks shows how relationships with others can produce self-awareness. When the other is lost, however, in the way Ansel grows lost, upon losing Lydia and his children, one can no longer see one’s self as clearly as before. 

“[With alcohol] your outer life and inner life merge [and] tend to beat up on you.” 

Banks explores various avenues of escape from pain, one of which is alcohol. But Banks also describes how, for Ansel, who struggles to show and express emotion, alcohol allows him to face and feel pain, rather than avoid it. This is one of many reversals Banks describes about how people cope with trauma and loss.

“[W]e believe the lie, that death, unlike taxes, can be postponed indefinitely, and we spend our lives defending that belief.” 

Here, Ansel describes how people in American culture generally live in denial about the existence of death. The survivors of the accident have a closer and more honest relationship to death than their peers. Banks describes how it is impossible for people to really know and accept the reality of death while also being hopeful and getting on with their daily lives. So, instead of admitting and facing death, people deny that it will happen to them and those they love.

“Of course, I thought of Vietnam, but nothing I had seen or felt in Vietnam had prepared me for this. There was no fire or smoke or explosive noise, no wild shouts and frightened screams; instead, there was silence, broken ice, snow, and men and women moving with abject slowness: there was death, and it was everywhere on the planet and it was natural and forever; not just dying, perversely here and merely now.” 

Ansel struggles to comprehend the accident in light of his previous experience in Vietnam. Before the accident, Ansel saw death incorrectly, and as being consigned to a certain time, place, and kind of experience (shouting and explosions and chaos). Instead, as Ansel says, the accident demonstrates that the reality is that death is everywhere and can come in any form at any time. This is a profoundly destabilizing and disturbing realization for him.

“[Risa] looked up at me, and in the bands of moonlight falling through the blinds I could see her face clearly, and it was no longer lovely to me. It didn’t even look like a woman’s face anymore; it was like the face of a male actor who had made himself up as a woman.” 

The accident causes a major shift in the relationship between Ansel and Risa. In describing the relationship before the accident, Ansel says that they said to one another “I love you,” and that, in some fleeting moments, Ansel even believed it. But the accident changed them both and rendered the kind of love they were “playing” at in their affair false, and seem like acting. Their mutual losses force them both to give up on trying to love each other. Once their children are dead, the “love” they had for each other seems inadequate, absurd, impossible, and false. 

“Nothing that came after the accident resembled [life] in any important way. So for us, 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 in a kind of purgatory, waiting to be moved to wherever the other dead ones had gone.”

Here, Ansel describes the indeterminacy and unreality he and others experience after surviving the accident. Banks repeatedly suggests that the survivors suffered their own kind of death, in that their relationship to life and to other people, both living and dead, changes after the bus accident. The survivors are isolated from each other and from the rest of the town. 

“When a person tries to comfort me, I respond by reassuring him or her—it’s usually a her—and in that way I shut her down, smothering all her good intentions by denying my need.”

Ansel describes here how he cannot accept support from his family or friends in dealing with the tragedy. Banks explores how the accident isolates characters like Ansel, who refuse outside support. For Ansel, no external comfort, not even from Risa, is possible. He faces his pain directly and, unlike the parents who participate in the lawsuit, does not try to impose blame as a barrier to experiencing suffering. 

“[S]o unnatural, so profoundly against the necessary order of things, that we cannot accept it […] [a] town that loses its children loses its meaning.” 

Part of the reason that the survivors of the accident and the parents who lost children in the accident cannot move on is because the death of children before their parents is a kind of perversion of the natural order of life. If Ansel’s purpose as a person was to care for his children, their deaths reveal that, as an adult, he had no other anchor or purpose. Without children, the adults in Sam Dent try, largely unsuccessfully, to redefine their lives.

“I’m under no delusions—I know that in the end a million-dollar settlement makes no real difference to them, that it probably only serves to sharpen their pain by constricting it with legal language and rewarding it with money, that it complicates the guilt they feel and forces them to question the authenticity of their own suffering. I know all that; I’ve seen it a hundred times.” 

Here, Stephens admits that a monetary settlement is not only inadequate to compensate grieving parents for their pain, it actually may harm the parents’ efforts to cope with their loss. Stephens is willing to sacrifice the well-being of his clients for the sake of his real goal: to use the legal system to punish those whom he feels are responsible. Through Stephens, Banks can express a profound skepticism regarding the compensation afforded by the justice system and can question society’s ability, through money, to redress tragedy and loss. 

“We’ve all lost our children. It’s like all the children of America are dead to us [...] in my lifetime something terrible happened that took our children away from us.” 

Here, Stephens makes a wider critique of American culture, contending it has perverted and warped its youth. His perspective is arguably skewed because his own daughter has become a drug addict. Stephens sees her addiction as a symptom of a larger problem created by modern American culture. 

“Blame creates comprehension.” 

The idea of blame permeates the novel. Some characters, like Ansel and Nichole, believe that there is no one to blame for the bus accident. On the extreme opposite end is Stephens, who believes there is no such thing as an accident. Banks examines not just the tendency to blame, but the purpose it serves, for those who are doing the blaming. Banks suggests that apportioning blame is a mechanism people use to try to comprehend something, like a pure accident, that is inherently without logic. Importantly, Banks explores the difference between genuine understanding (such as knowledge of exactly how fast Dolores really was going) with blame, which is an apportioning of fault that may have nothing to do with “truth” of the facts themselves.  

“The true jury of a person’s peers is the people of her town. Only they, the people who have known her all her life, and not twelve strangers, can decide her guilt or innocence. And if Dolores […] has committed a crime, then it’s a crime against them, not the state, so they are the ones who must decide her punishment too. What Abbott is saying, Mr. Stephens, is forget the lawsuit.” 

The novel explores and complicates various competing definitions of justice. Here, Dolores translates Abbott’s response to the lawsuit Stephens intends to bring. Banks repeatedly suggests that Abbott’s unconventional understanding and perspective is thoughtful and wise. Through Abbott, Banks questions whether the civil justice system can provide Dolores with justice. Notably, Abbott does not defend Dolores or say she is blameless. Instead, he asks what form of alternative judgment might provide a more just or appropriate result. 

“Until this moment, I had for years been tied to the ground, helpless and enraged by my own inability to choose between belief and disbelief […] Now, for the first time in all those years, I was in a position to know the truth—and then to act. Out of desperation, Zoe had freed me from love. Whether she had AIDS or was lying to me, I would soon know. Either way, I was free.” 

At the end of his chapter, Stephens experiences an emotional catharsis that completes the arc of his character and redefines his relationship with his daughter, Zoe. At this point, Stephens has been living for a long time with the uncertainty of not knowing whether it was possible to save Zoe, nor if he was to blame for what she has become. In the moment that Zoe tells Stephens she has tested HIV positive, Stephens is finally able to accept that, in one way or another, Zoe will die, and that there is no longer anything he can do to prevent that outcome. He is not responsible anymore for what happens to her, and he cannot redirect her life or rescue her. He will care for her, and give her money, but he will no longer torture himself with thoughts that he should be doing more, or that if he simply takes a particular action, Zoe can be saved. Like Dolores’ own realization at the end of the novel, Stephens’ shift here is both terrible and liberating. 

“[Jennie is] the one, she’s the family to me, the whole family; the rest of them [...] make me feel like I have to protect myself from them.” 

Long before the accident, Nichole suffers a loss of innocence triggered by her father’s sexual abuse. The isolation, self-loathing, and powerlessness she describes as features of her life came before the accident, not after. The exception to how Nichole perceives her family is Nichole’s sister, Jennie, with whom Nichole has a warm and sincere connection. With Jennie, Nichole feels safe enough to be herself and to feel like a child again. After the accident, Nichole transitions into adulthood and takes responsibility for her life and the truth of the abuse she suffered.

“But now I saw him as a thief, just a sneaky little thief in the night who had robbed his own daughter of what was supposed to be permanently hers—like he had robbed me of my soul or something, whatever it was that Jennie still had and I didn’t. And the accident robbed me of my body.”  

Here, Nichole describes how her perspective on her father’s abuse shifted after the accident. Rather than hating herself and feeling suicidal, Nichole is able to blame her father and see him not as powerful, but as instead pathetic. She also recognizes the permanent damage that he has done to her psyche and that, through his abuse, she lost her innocence and her sense of identity. 

“I hitched myself out of the wheelchair and when I swing onto the bed, my skirt got hitched up, and I sat there for a minute, looking at my dumb worthless legs reflected in the window glass. […] How much had they been worth a year ago, I wondered, or last fall, […] and to whom? That was the real question. To me, my legs were worth everything then and nothing now. But to Mom and Daddy, nothing then and a couple of million dollars now.” 

Nichole recognizes a bizarre result of the accident: she feels as though her body has been taken from her, that she has suffered a profound loss but that at the same time, the accident has created tremendous monetary value through her disability. According to the civil justice system, her injuries and suffering are worth cash. Nichole’s parents, Sam and Mary, like the Walkers and the Ottos, seek remuneration after the accident. But the novel repeatedly questions whether money offers any kind of closure or meaningful consolation. Stephens states outright that money does not bring bereaved parents peace, and Nichole is savvy enough to recognize that even though her legs are worth a substantial amount of money to her parents, they are worth nothing to her. Banks considers what pecuniary “value” society places on lives and bodies and suggests that the pursuit of money is another avenue by which people seek to avoid dealing with the real pain of irreparable loss.

“[Ansel] no longer loved anybody. All the man had was himself. And you can’t love only yourself.” 

Here, Dolores describes how Ansel implodes after the death of his children. Ansel was a man defined in large part in relation to those he loved and cared for. His children and their needs shaped his life and gave him purpose and direction. Their needs distracted him from the grief of losing his wife to cancer and assured he lived with purpose. Without his children to love, Ansel’s life collapses and he descends into alcoholism. 

“A great weight […] had been lifted.” 

Dolores at once often feels both tremendous solitude and great strength. Rather than live with the uncertainty of not knowing what people think of her, and not knowing whether she was to blame, Nichole’s statement at the deposition about the speed Dolores was driving affords the entire town a means to move on. It also clarifies for Dolores how people feel about her, and what their final judgment is. Dolores seems to accept the role of the scapegoat and in doing so, she is largely cut off from the town.

“Dolores says that she and the children involved in the accident 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 or despised us, whether they cheered for our destruction or applauded our victory over adversity, they did it to meet their needs, not ours. Which, since it could be no other way, was exactly as it should be.”

“Dolores says that she and the children involved in the accident 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 or despised us, whether they cheered for our destruction or applauded our victory over adversity, they did it to meet their needs, not ours. Which, since it could be no other way, was exactly as it should be.”