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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 Charlie…But 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
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