A woman gets on a bus in The Wayward Bus by John Steinbeck and is asked her name. She glances at a cigarette advertisement on the wall and then out of the window at a tree, and says she is Camille Oaks. She also tells everyone she is a dental nurse, which she is not. What she actually does is take her clothes off at private dinners for businessmen, and one of the men on the bus has watched her do it.
By the end of the day, Camille will have been the only person in the novel to say a true thing out loud. That inversion is the design of The Wayward Bus by John Steinbeck, and it is why a group will get more out of this book than its reputation suggests.
What The Wayward Bus Actually Is
A crossroads in central California called Rebel Corners: a lunchroom, a garage, a gas pump and a bus franchise, all run by Juan Chicoy and his wife Alice. Juan drives the only service to San Juan de la Cruz, a town forty-nine miles off. The axle broke yesterday. The passengers slept in the owners’ beds. It has rained all night and the river is rising.
Nine people get on. By mid-afternoon the bus is in a ditch on an abandoned stage road, the driver has walked off into the hills, and the passengers are sheltering in caves under a cliff with the word REPENT painted across it in failing black letters.
The author’s own comparison was to Chaucer and to Boccaccio, which is the right way for a group to approach it. The Wayward Bus by John Steinbeck is not a plot. It is a set of people, told one at a time, in whatever order suits the author.
Nobody on The Wayward Bus Says What They Want
Work through the cast of The Wayward Bus by John Steinbeck and the pattern is unmistakable. This is the discussion.
Juan Chicoy wants to abandon his wife, his business and every passenger on board, and cannot bring himself to decide, so he strikes a bargain with the small metal Virgin on his dashboard: if the bus mires down past saving, he will take it as permission. Then he cheats, spinning the wheels deliberately until the axle sits on the ground. He walks away and finds he feels nothing he expected to feel.
Bernice Pritchard wants a small orchid house and has spent years engineering her husband into suggesting it himself. Her weapon is a migraine she cannot control and will not schedule, deployed at the moment of maximum cost to everyone else.
Mr Pritchard wants to be admired by a travelling salesman who has read him correctly inside an hour. Norma wants a family so badly she has invented one, and keeps a letter to a film star hidden in a locked suitcase. Mildred wants an experience her parents will never learn about. The teenage mechanic wants to be called by his own name, which is the one request in the book that is granted.
And Camille, who lies about her name and her job because she has to, is the only one who describes her situation accurately when it matters.
The Scene in The Wayward Bus That Needs a Warning
This has to be said plainly before anybody assigns The Wayward Bus by John Steinbeck to a table of readers.
Mr Pritchard has spent the afternoon making a clumsy and self-deceiving proposition to Camille, framed as a job offer. She refuses it, tells him exactly what she thinks of him and of the men at his club, and walks off. He goes to the cave where his wife is lying down with a headache, and he rapes her.
Steinbeck writes it in about eight lines. There is no violence on the page beyond a torn dress and a woman saying she does not know him. What follows is harder: Bernice waits until he has gone, then draws her own fingernails down her cheek, rubs dirt from the cave floor into the cuts, and arranges her face into dignified silence for the rest of the journey. She has already decided she will forgive him, and that it must not be too soon, for his own good.
A group will want to talk about what the novel is doing here. The scene is not sensationalised and it is not excused. It is also given no more space than the salesman’s novelty lavatory shot glass, and whether that flatness is a moral failure or the whole point of the method is the argument worth having.
Where It Will Lose People
- Each person is introduced by way of their appetites, and the tenth such introduction reads as a tic rather than a method.
- There is almost no humour, which in Steinbeck is disorienting. Nothing pushes back against the coldness.
- Two of the women are fully alive and two are case studies with handbags.
- The allegory is heavily signposted. The names, the painted cliff and the bus itself are doing visible work, and some readers find that insulting.
- Nobody in The Wayward Bus by John Steinbeck is likeable. If a group needs somebody to root for, this is not the book.
Reading The Wayward Bus Alongside John Steinbeck’s Famous Books
This came out in February 1947, eight years after the novel our analysis of The Grapes of Wrath covers, and five years before the one in our analysis of East of Eden. Steinbeck began it in Mexico in 1945 while finishing the novella discussed in our analysis of The Pearl, imagining at first something picaresque and short. It grew past a hundred thousand words instead.
The commercial numbers were startling and the reviews were not. A first printing of 750,000 copies and a book club selection, with advance orders near a million, and then notices that cancelled each other out. Ten years later Twentieth Century Fox filmed it as the sort of cheerful product the novel had set out to mock. The destination town, incidentally, is named for John of the Cross, the mystic who wrote about the dark night of the soul, which is not an accident.
Questions for the Table
Almost every good question in The Wayward Bus by John Steinbeck is about motive rather than event, so expect the table to spend the evening on why rather than what.
- Juan rigs the test he set for himself and then goes back anyway. Why?
- Is Camille treated better by this novel than any other character, and if so, why her?
- What is the book saying by giving the assault in the cave no more weight than a sales pitch?
- Bernice’s headaches are genuine pain and also a weapon. Can both be true?
- The bus never arrives. Does the ending earn that?
- Is there a single person on board you would want to spend an evening with?
Before You Assign It
Sexual assault within a marriage, an attempted assault on a teenage girl, a stroke, a man quietly planning his own death, prolonged solitary drinking, and racial and sexual language from 1947 that the narration reports without comment.
What It Leaves Behind
A cold, specific discomfort that very little else in his work produces.
The famous books give you people wronged by something larger than themselves, and the reader is invited to be on their side. The Wayward Bus by John Steinbeck removes the larger thing. There is no bank here, no drought, no growers’ association. There are ten people in the rain on a hill, each of them concealing an ordinary want, and the harm they do each other over the course of one afternoon is entirely sufficient without any help from history.
Juan says at one point, when he is asked whether he meant something he had said, that he really means everything. He is the only character of whom that is true, and he is also the one who spent the afternoon trying to get divine permission to walk out on his own life. Then the lights of the town appear, and the book stops.