Loved writing and story line but characters so depressing ( )

This book reminds me a lot of the Bridge of San Luis Rey, enough that I was waiting for the bus to be swept away by the collapsing bridge for much of the story. The characters included quite a few I found annoying, though the way they interacted was amusing. This one's not as good as East of Eden or Winters of Our Discontent, but among his shorter novels this one's pretty good. ( )

In Chapter 11 of The Wayward Bus, author John Steinbeck spends a full page describing one character's attempt to swat a bluebottle fly. It may well be the best way for me to summarise the novel as a whole, for it immediately reminded me of an infamous episode of the TV series Breaking Bad, one which abandoned plot and momentum to devote its entire runtime to a main character rooting out and defeating a rogue housefly. As has occurred to other reviewers, it seems, The Wayward Bus seems to me to be the literary equivalent of such a 'bottle episode'.

So-named because they put a pause on the wider serialised story to confine a group of characters together in a small space to observe how they react to one another, 'bottle episodes' have a mixed reputation among audiences. The same is true of The Wayward Bus. Many will immediately recognise that Steinbeck's novel is not their cup of tea – nor, in truth, is it mine – as in an entirely plotless 300 pages the author puts a group of characters together at an isolated crossroads-café-cum-bus-stop in rural California and observes how they interact. Many of the things we enjoy about novels in general – pace and purpose chief among them – are not found at any point here.

And yet, The Wayward Bus is one of those rare bottle episodes that works. Steinbeck's characterisation – always a strength – is on top form, even if we don't see his characters actually do anything of note. The writing is clever, with humorous subtle callbacks to previous conversations between characters. By design, there might not be much of anything else, but Steinbeck leisurely drops you into the lives of some well-drawn characters as they go about a single day. It's just about enough. ( )

On the face of it, this is just a version of that rather hackneyed plot device — more popular on stage and screen than in novels — where you bring an apparently random bunch of strangers together and put them under pressure in some unexpected way to see what happens. In this case the driver and passengers on a bus making a cross-country journey in California at a moment when the rivers are up and the bridges liable to collapse at any moment.

Of course, Steinbeck uses the situation to dig into a whole range of social problems of the USA in the immediate aftermath of World War II. Slightly surprisingly, perhaps, he focusses in particular on the situation of his female characters. You could almost claim this as a feminist novel, in that it talks about the disconnect between women's aspirations and the roles actually available to them in forties society, and shows us something of what it must feel like to be on the receiving end of unwanted male sexual attention. But there's probably also a strong element of male fantasy in the way these things are worked out. And how does Steinbeck know what women talk about in the ladies' toilets, unless he was listening behind the door...?

I loved Steinbeck's close attention to the natural and man-made background of rural California: from the details of the mechanical work being done on Juan's old bus to the fabulous thumbnail survey of the ecology of a roadside verge, it all feels totally convincing and well-observed, and it cleverly plays into the mood and timing of the foreground story. ( )

El accidentado viaje de un desastrado autobús rural entre las poblaciones de Rebel Corners y San Juan de la Cruz, en California, al término de la Segunda Guerra Mundial, se convierte en un magistral retrato de personajes y en un acerado estudio sobre los problemas centrales de todos los hombres en todas las épocas: la familia, el sexo, el amor, las ambiciones, las frustraciones y los anhelos... Lejos del sentimentalismo y la autocomplacencia, es un viaje interior hacia el corazón de unos viajeros perdidos en la decepción del sueño americano...