The Boy on the Bus Book

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 afternoon school 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.
The book cover describes an intriguing scenario: A Vermont housewife finds that the last boy on the bus, the boy who hasn't left the bus because he doesn't seem to know that he's arrived at his home, both is and somehow is not her son Charlie. He looks mostly right, sounds mostly right, but he is different; rather than being a severely asthmatic weakling, this boy seems more robust, even more mature. No one -- not the bus driver, the sheriff, the neighbors, the husband, the older daughter -- can tell if this is really Charlie. Each falls back upon the strange observation, "You're his mother; you should know."
This back-cover description is far more exciting than the book itself. Stewing in her analytical juices, dragging the reader through page after tedious page of perversely drawn analogy and pretentiously clever asides, author 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 42 minutes of television screen time, these days). What I'm most reminded of is the cover of an issue of Writer's Digest (a magazine which, some 25 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 Judith Guest's Ordinary People. And for a rollicking good tale of children, spend a little time with relative newcomer M. Bradley Davis, whose The Hand in the Mirror: Mindfusion Book 1 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.