The Boy on the Bus: A Novel

Meg Landry's family is dissolving like a drop of ink striking a bowl of water. Jeff, Meg's partner and the father of her two children, abandoned the family nine months ago to work on an architecture project in Toronto; their rebellious teenage daughter Katie has been away at boarding school; and now their eight-year-old asthmatic son Charlie seems to have been replaced by a child who's almost, but not quite, Charlie—like a bad Xerox copy.

This is the eerie, unsettling domestic portrait painted in Deborah Schupack's first novel, The Boy on the Bus.

The sense of unease starts in the first paragraph: This ritual, her son coming home from school, was all wrong. It was taking too long, and now the driver was coming around the bus. The show more school bus has stopped on the road outside her Vermont farmhouse; it's the last stop of the day and there's only one child left on board: Charlie. For some reason, he refuses to get out of his seat.

"Hon?" Meg started to walk down the aisle but slowed almost immediately, each step smaller than the one before. As he shifted from distant to close, she slowed to a stop. This was not her son.

He looks like Charlie, but he's not exactly Charlie. The eyes are narrower, the hair's curlier, the face is fuller and firmer ("a more mature face"). A mother should know her own son, shouldn't she?...Shouldn't she?

That's the question, and the baffling mystery, at the heart of this odd, haunting book. Schupack describes the terror and uncertainty of parenting with lyrical prose that falls somewhere between Alice McDermott and David Lynch. What parent hasn't suffered doubts like the ones which constantly scroll through Meg's mind?

Is this really Charlie and she just hasn't been paying attention to the changes he's going through? Is this an imposter, sent to replace the vanished Charlie? There he was again, at the foot of the stairs. He shimmered in a shallow pool of familiarity.

Or is this all a dream, a harrowing, symbolic tumble down the rabbit hole or through the looking glass? (The fact that Jeff's last name is Carroll might be a clue to the latter theory.)

As her family reconstitutes—Jeff returns from Canada, Katie come back from boarding school—Meg looks for clues in the new boy's behavior (that's how she refers to him, "the boy") to help explain where her sickly, coughing son has vanished. Those around her aren't as certain that he's not Charlie. "It sure looks enough like him," Jeff says. Even the pediatrician wonders why Meg is making such a fuss.

The boy is enigmatic and though he seems to know all of Charlie's routines, he's not quite the same boy she put on the bus in the morning. Then again, how well does she think she really knew Charlie?

Imagine, she thought, children as approximations. Then again, in a sense they were. Each time your child returned home, he was an approximation of who you had sent out into the world that morning. And each morning, he was an approximation of who you'd tried to seal with a kiss the night before.

Midway through the book, we start to wonder, is Meg losing her mind? Is this little more than the diary of a mad housewife who can no longer recognize her own son? After all, we know that Meg is "porous with exhaustion. Porous as coral. Sea and sand sweeping in, sweeping out, eroding, returning such a thing as coral to the ocean."

Schupack honestly addresses the unspoken qualms all parents have at one time or another. The Boy on the Bus charts that netherworld mothers and fathers navigate: when to love, when to smother, when to release, when to panic, when to pray. You know, the daily "fear, love, guilt, exhaustion, need." Charlie's blurred identity becomes symbolic for all that Meg has tried to do with her life—the ambitions that have shriveled, the goals she's never reached, the domestic boxes she's drawn around herself. The novel is as much about the woman in the house as it is the boy on the bus.

But it’s the psychological puzzle which drives the taut narrative forward. As the story gets more tangled and dark with each passing page, we wait for the other shoe to drop. Trouble is, Schupack never lets it fall, never rouses us from the drowsy unease that permeates the book. In the end, we're left with no precise answers to the domestic mystery and while it's easy to close The Boy on the Bus irritated at the author for not bringing the denouement to a firm conclusion, perhaps that's Schupack's whole point: parenting is a fuzzy science with no certain solutions. There will be days when even our own children will look like strangers. show less

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 show more 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. show less

I picked this up for some light entertainment at Chapters a couple of weeks ago. Meg’s eight-year-old son arrives home from school on the long Easter weekend, apparently another person. He looks very similar, but he doesn’t seem to remember a lot of things and his asthma has been miraculously cured. His estranged Dad rushes home to complicate the situation.

I thought this was an interesting book about how people change without the ones closest to them noticing. My copy came with 3 pages of “A Conversation with Authorâ€? at the back. In reading the conversation I discovered that I had totally missed what was going on in the final chapters. I should go back and re-read the book but ……. it wasn’t show more that good. Maybe you would enjoy it. show less

A well-written book with some nice, fancy words (reify, noctilucent come to mind), but I didn't get it. One of the reviews mentions a version with the author's comments at the end; I wish I could read them.

When Meg gets on the school bus for her son, Charlie, she realizes that the boy on the bus is not her son. Or is he? Everyone is always changing, aging, maturing, new cells are born and old ones die, mannerisms, behaviors evolve: At what point do changes become too drastic? Why does no one else say that they have noticed what Meg notices? Finally, what kind of person is the boy?

I can't wait to get rid of this book. Nothing about it rang true from a mother's vantage point; nothing.

Boring

Read review at: http://letitread.blogspot.com/2009/12/book-review-deborah-schupack-boy-on-bus.ht...