Russell Banks writes books about ordinary people trying to live decent lives in less than ideal circumstances. In the case of The Sweet Hereafter, the terrible calamity is a school bus accident in an upstate New York town; the mundane reality is that the town’s life must go on after its children have been killed in the crash. Providing different perspectives on events, overlapping stories told by four different people portray how each narrator must process grief, and struggle for meaning, in his or her own way. Banks’s novel allows us to see into the heart of a community that is speechless with sorrow. With the same magnanimity through which he imparts the lessons of calamity, Banks imparts the lessons of community as well.