Where Have All the Good Men Gone?: Afflicted Fathers and Endangered Daughters in Russell Banks's The Sweet Hereafter

Abstract

This article explores a recurrent theme in postwar American culture, a perceived crisis of manhood/masculinity, through Russell Banks's novel The Sweet Hereafter. On one level, Banks establishes a sense of anxiety and threat with roots in confused and devalued masculine roles. Linked in the narrative to the deaths of multiple children of a small town and especially to fathers' failure to protect their daughters, Banks implies that America's future is imperiled by the degradation of fatherhood. But on a deeper level, the novel suggests that at the core of America's postwar anxiety about families and fathers is not a loss but a lack. The idealized masculine roles whose loss we mourn, Banks tells us, may never really have existed at all.