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 novel to date, in which the Adirondack town of Sam Dent is devastated by the loss of 14 of...