Customer Reviews

The Boy on the Bus: A Novel

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(9)

 

 

The boy that Meg put on the school bus this Vermont morning was her asthmatic 8-year-old son, Charlie. The boy who comes home in the afternoon is not. Sure, he almost looks like Charlie, almost acts like Charlie, almost knows the things Charlie should know, but not quite. As Meg sits on the bus studying this boy, the bus driver, Sandy, tells her, "We looked back out the window and there you were, reappearing at the front door when you had been standing there only a second ago." The sheriff arrives, with questions. Meg's partner, Jeff, is summoned from his job in Toronto. Meg's daughter, Katie, a 13-year-old very full of herself, is retrieved from boarding school. The boy is taken to Charlie's doctor for tests, where it's discovered he no longer has asthma. He's taller, stronger, more adventurous. Everyone asks the same question: Is this Charlie? And no one knows.

Because the book jacket made the mistake of calling THE BOY ON THE BUS a mystery, I expected a different sort of ending and was disappointed by the lack of resolution. Had Schupack used Meg's identity crisis to resolve the questions, I would have been satisfied, but as it was I enjoyed every moment up until the last several pages, then felt cheated. Still, this little novel is an excellent psychological portrait of a family in limbo. All of the characters except Charlie are well drawn (Charlie comes across as shadowy at best, but perhaps that's intended), the prose is beautiful and descriptive, the dialogue realistic, and the resulting impression very surreal. Although at times I had trouble with the plot -- if my kid came home in Charlie's condition I'd be screaming for conclusive evidence -- I also appreciated the fact that Schupack didn't turn this story into a thriller but instead kept the search very much inside the family's heads. Even as Meg no longer knows her own son, she finds herself a stranger to her partner and daughter as well. And even herself.

Although certainly not a mystery as claimed, THE BOY ON THE BUS is a clever and expertly crafted search for identity and can be appreciated as such.

Anna Klein

THE BOY ON THE BUS, Deborah Shupack's first novel, opens with a school bus stopping to drop its final passenger at an upper-middle-class home in rural Vermont. But when Meg Landry climbs aboard to greet her eight-year-old son, who remains in his seat, she realizes that something is amiss. Mother and child don't recognize each other. "This was not her son," Meg thinks. "He looked quite a bit like CharlieBut there were differences."

Meg is at a loss as to how to explain the situation and feels quite awkward in front of Sandy, the school bus driver on whom she has an incipient crush. She is overwhelmed and has an eerie sense of powerlessness. Soon, several townspeople, including the sheriff, are gathered around the bus and, in the unspoken pressure to keep things moving along normally, Meg invites the young stranger into her house.

The cool bravura of Schupak's first chapter leaves the reader feeling a weird chill and a gnawing curiosity. The chill lingers throughout the book's terse 215 pages. The curiosity, to a certain extent, is left unrewarded. Charlie is not a Stepford child, there are no evil experiments taking place in small town New England and no abductions or exorcisms ensue. Instead, with creeping subtlety and creepy insistence, THE BOY ON THE BUS evolves into a compelling meditation on personal identity and the degree to which family members can never know each other --- and themselves. The novel, even in its brevity, is much more like a Twilight Zone episode than a plot-thick airport paperback.

For some readers, the lack of a puzzle-perfect solution to the mysteries of THE BOY ON THE BUS will make the novel less than satisfying. Others, however, will cheer for Schupak's intellectual audacity and her mischievous placement of familiar genre landmarks (the estranged husband, the over-involved small town sheriff, the missing child) at the beginning of what proves to be an unexpectedly experimental work of literature. Like an exurban Paul Auster, Schupack seamlessly blends the quotidian and the oblique.

In her portrayal of Meg's relationship with her husband Jeff, who has been away on business for much of the past two years, Schupack also begs favorable comparison to the master of abstract domestic riddles, playwright Edward Albee. There are echoes of Albee's miscommunicating couples from WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF, THE PLAY ABOUT THE BABY and THE GOAT, OR WHO IS SYLVIA in Meg and Jeff's clipped dialogue --- indirect at one moment, stinging the next. And like Albee's dueling duos, their discussions are ultimately more about the existentialism of wedded life (How are we connected? What does our marriage mean?) rather than the specific question of the situation at hand (Is this boy our son Charlie?).

It eventually becomes clear that Meg's confusion about the boy is linked to her own acute identity crisis. Once an aspiring painter, Meg has let her artistic pursuits drift to the wayside, turning her life's focus to motherhood. But tugged by muffled yearnings to reclaim the pursuit she has gradually abandoned, Meg seems to experience a sort of internal self-division, an inability to integrate her past self with her present circumstances. She is torn between raising children and birthing brainchildren.

Written in elegant plainspoken prose that doesn't lend easily to quoted extracts, THE BOY ON THE BUS is a smooth and easy read that you can finish in one sitting. Only upon reaching its end does the reader realize quite how prickly and provocative the novel is. Infused with ambiguity and endless seductiveness, this novel is a gem of a debut.

--- Reviewed by Jim Gladstone

Deborah Schupack's debut novel reminds me of the capgras syndrome, a psychological condition in which the patient fails to recognize a close family member or friends. Maybe our protagonist Meg's condition is not as severe as such, or she doesn't suffer from it at all, but the idea of a mother who fails to recognize her own son is promising enough to draw my attention.

Vermont. Mudseason. On an ordinary Thursday afternoon, something extraordinary, at least to Meg, happens. The boy who comes home on the school bus is not the boy whom she sends off to school on the same bus this morning! The new boy looks and acts like Charlie, her 8-year-old son; but there is something subtly and indescribably different about him despite the copper hair and tea-brown eyes that share with Charlie's. Where does he get that argyle sweater that shouldn't be worn by an 8-year-old? What happens to his face that looks maturer? Not only is the sheriff summoned to the bus, the whole town show up and prey on her for information of her child's tantrum. A tension kicks in as the whole family comes home. Jeff Carroll, Meg's partner and father of the boy and his 13-year-old sister Katie, has taken up an architectural project in Canada and is seldom found at home. Katie is retrieved from the boarding school to talk her brother and see what might have gone amiss. Neither Jeff nor Katie resolve to make out of Charlie's problem. He's just acting weird, Katie notes. Dr. Ireland at the Vermont County Hospital concludes that the boy no longer has asthma. Not only is the boy more energetic and stronger, he is full of knowledge that a 8-year-old usually will not bear. He is charming and unnervingly polite.

This book is more about family and Meg's personal identity crisis than mystery that the blurb claims to be. I'm somewhat disappointed Schupack has not offered a solid resolution to the question that troubles Meg (and myself): Is that really Charlie? I guess it's not so much about whether the boy is Charlie or not; of more interest to me is what might have prompted Meg to think the boy is not Charlie. Meg herself struggles with being a mother and an aspiring painter. The very reason to move into a farm in Vermont is to rekindle that painter's aspiration in Meg that was inevitably put away when she had to focus on being a mother. Continual absences of Jeff and Charlie's chronic asthmatic condition take a toll on Meg as well. A lack of father figure also takes a toll on the boy, who is willing to "disappear" in exchange for his father's stay at the house. While Meg no longer knows her son, she feels she doesn't deserve the child, who is better and more grown up. The novel follows this family for less than 4 days but has revealed a slice of a typical family and its issues: rebellious teenage daughter who calls her brother a "weakling", husband-and-wife communication (or the lack of such)....Despite an ending that might be somewhat ambiguous, the book is cleverly and elegantly written. 3.9 stars.

If you like your books with neatly tied ends and simple answers to all your questions, perhaps this one isn't for you. But if you pass it up for that reason, you will have missed an eerie and mind-twisting book that will haunt you for some time after you turn the last page.

Other reviewers have outlined the basic plot, so I won't bother with that. Let me just say that this book will hit home for any parent. Like Meg, we send our children out in the world and can be startled by the ways in which they change...the people they turn into. Haven't we all had days of wondering if our child is a changeling? Deborah Schupack takes this feeling and runs with it, crafting a story that gives us a new look at identity and parenting and may leave you wondering how well you know your own child.

This is a wonderful book.

Instead of calling this novel, "The Boy on the Bus," the author should have called it, "The Crazy Mother!" This book was NOT, as I was led to believe, a story about a woman whose child is missing. This is a story about a woman who seems a little mentally unbalanced. As I was reading this book, not once did I truly believe that the boy on the bus was not Charlie. I kept thinking, "what is wrong with this mother???" She seemed overly concerned about Charlie's physical safety, always asking if he was sick or hurt, making a mountain out of every molehill. I even wondered if the woman was supposed to have Munchaussen's-by-proxy disorder! By the end of the book, I figured out that the woman was just having some sort of identity crises. Her life partner (he and she never married) and she were estranged (who knows why?), her older daughter and she were also estranged (probably the woman had pushed her daughter away because she was slways hovering over poor, asthmatic little Charlie), and now the woman discovers that Charlie is no longer a sickly little boy. He has outgrown his asthma and is perfectly healthy! He simply milks it for all it's worth to get attention from his family. Now the woman does not know what her role in life is anymore, now that she no longer is wife, caretaker of the sickly, or idol to her daughter. She does not know who SHE is, and she projects that onto Charlie, seeming not to know who he is.The woman is a nutshop. A very bizarre story, and one I would not recommend to other readers out there.

Deborah Schupack's first effort, the novel "The Boy on the Bus," is one of those painfully self-indulgent and pointless "artistic works" which plague the bookshelves from time to time. Beginning with an interesting premise -- a mother's creeping certainty that this boy on the bus is a close approximation of, but is not truly, her son -- Schupack takes us on a 215 page slog through a quagmire of psychological pretension which ultimately, as Shakespeare put it, signifies nothing.

Stewing in her analytical juices, dragging the reader through page after tedious page of perversely drawn analogy and pretentiously clever asides, Schupack forgot the single most important aspect of telling a story: It needs to have a bloody point! Hints are dropped all over the place, each one capable of leading to a satisfying explanation and a powerful resolution to the facts in evidence; alas, Schupack seems not to have known what she wanted her book to be when it grew up.

This is the second problem with this work: It's about a hundred or more pages too long. If the story actually had a point and an ending, it could be quite reasonably condensed into an hour-long episode of "The Outer Limits" (meaning about 44 minutes of screen time). What I'm most reminded of is the cover of an issue of "Writer's Digest" (a magazine which, some 20 years ago, was worth reading and taking seriously), whereupon a sad-faced lady had "a short story, small, little cash worth," while her happy-faced twin had "a novel, big, worth a lot of money." There are times when the essence of a story simply cannot support more than about 20,000 words of expression.

If you enjoy precious authors such as Paul Auster or Richard Brautigan -- you know, the stuff whose fans look down your nose at you if you "just don't get it" -- then this book is for you. Enjoy the complete absence of plot, the rambling attempt at overly-intellectual self-importance through time-wasting obfuscation, and pat yourself on the back for "getting it."

Conversely, if you want a good story, look elsewhere. For the "things are not what they seem" genre, try "Harvest Home" by Thomas Tryon, Dean Koontz's "False Memory," or classics like Ira Levin's "The Stepford Wives." For explorations into the alienation of the modern family, no one has yet topped "Ordinary People." And for a rollicking good tale of children, spend a little time with newcomer M. Bradley Davis, whose "Hand in the Mirror" will provide an abundance of thought-provoking ideas set amid the vast and fertile genre of science fiction.

I hope that, should Ms. Schupack have another offering in the wings, she ensures that it is a whole boy, on the right bus, and that both actually go somewhere.

Our book club read this and we had a wonderful, spirited discussion. There's so much to talk about, whether you love the book (which I did) or not. The premise is fascinating, and execution is surprising, strange and very compelling. All this led to great debates of themes that were interesting to all of us--parents and children, and the ways we depend on each other and let each other down. The book is powerful, poetic and beautifully written. Images have stayed with me to this day.

My book club (9 women) read this and loved it! It makes for a great discussion because everyone has their own take on things. Is the boy on the bus really Charlie? Or is something up with his mother? And what about his father--a good guy who's fighting a losing battle (which I think) or a distant, checked-out guy who's not doing much to help? Read it, talk about it, and just listen to what other people think!

This story has an intriguing premise and makes several layers of reading possible, literal and metaphorical. Looking at the other reader reviews, I am amazed by the fact that nobody else understood that there IS in fact a clear ending to the story. Just re-read all the passages in the book pertaining to the bus driver, Sandy, with very special attention to detail. It's all quite obvious.
Unfortunately, I found this story's third person narrative, however unusual, to be repetitive and there seems to be little new said between pages 100 and 180. This is unfortunate, since several of the characterizations and descriptions are crisp and unforgettable. Read this book only if you are a very fast reader.

Deborah Schupack's debut novel is a ride that brings with it a sense of unease - rather like some of the best of the old TWILIGHT ZONE episodes, the ones that didn't involve a monster or a serial killer or an alien invasion, the ones that focused on an aspect of the everyday that was just out of sync enough to make the viewer uncomfortable. The novel is set in a small town in rural Vermont, and centered on a relatively normal family going through pretty common growing pains. Meg and Jeff - who chose not to get married - have two children: 13 year-old Katie and 8 year-old Charlie. Katie has earnestly embraced the expected rebellion of her early teens, and is making life miserable for her little brother as well as just about any adult who comes around her. Charlie is asthmatic - and it is his fragility (at least as perceived by his mother) that is at the center of the whirlpool. Over the last couple of years, Jeff has seemingly sought out architectural jobs that take him further from home, for longer periods of time. He and Meg are drifting apart, and neither one is quite sure how to deal with it - if they recognize it at all. Meg, for her part, is far too busy worrying constantly about Charlie - so much so that she has memory lapses. She can't remember events from a couple of days before - some older memories that should be cemented into place in the family foundation are even hard for her to grasp.

One day the school bus arrives, as usual, to return Charlie home - but the boy doesn't get off. Meg waits for a bit - she's even unsure, when thinking about it later, for how long - then goes out to the bus, asking the driver what's going on. `See for yourself,' is his cryptic reply. She enters the bus and peers down the aisle to where her son sits - and sees a boy that looks quite a bit like Charlie, but not quite, at least to her eyes and mind. When Meg finally coaxes the boy off the bus and into the house, she realizes that the process has taken much longer than she imagined - a crowd has gathered. As she observes the boy more and more over the next few hours, then days, she becomes more and more detached from reality, trying to prove to herself - and to the rest of her family - that the boy is, or is not, Charlie. Busybody neighbors, the local sheriff, a the boy's pediatrician, his father and sister all become involved in solving the `mystery' of Charlie - but none of them is as convinced as Meg that this is not her son. Charlie's reaction to what is going on around him comes into play as well, of course. There's a particularly revealing conversation between mother and son - although it seems off the cuff at the time - about the various defenses that the body and mind can call on in times of threat.

The author does a nice job of moving the story along, as well as making the characters down-to-earth enough to be believable - and she handles the stress/detachment/disassociation aspects of the story with intelligence and empathy, making the novel not only entertaining on one level, but eye-opening on others. She's a talented writer, and she's done her homework well - this is a very rewarding novel as a result.