SOURCE: Rifkind, Donna. “A Town Divided.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4646 (17 April 1992): 20.

In the following review, Rifkind provides a stylistic and thematic examination of The Sweet Hereafter, praising the novel's subtle realism.

“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...