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Adult Books - Fiction - General Fiction
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The Boy on the Bus.
Schupack, Deborah (author).
Mar. 2003. 224p. Free Press, hardcover, $23 (0-7432-4220-3).
REVIEW.
First published February 15, 2003 (Booklist).
Nothing bizarre ever happens in the tiny Vermont town where Meg lives with her husband, Jeff, and their two children: Katie, the recalcitrant teenager, and eight-year-old Charlie, an asthmatic. Then one day Charlie just doesn’t seem to be himself any more, although, as Jeff tells Meg, “It sure looks enough like him.” In her eerie debut novel, Schupack doesn’t struggle unduly over whether the boy on the bus is actually Charlie or not but instead perceptively explores the multiple possibilities for Meg’s reaction to his startling presence in their hitherto-normal life. As a mother of an asthmatic, she feels burdened by the corresponding constant “fear, love, guilt, exhaustion, need.” She is also bored with her emotionally distant husband and frustrated at her inability to sustain her artistic career. So has she finally “let go of the reins”? Or has Charlie so gradually outgrown his asthma that Meg, straitjacketed by routine, is just now seeing the transformation? “You’re the mother, you know what’s best,” Jeff tells her, but the identity conundrum lingers, remaining unresolved even with the novel’s chilling denouement. — Deborah Donovan
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