The Goddamn Bus of Happiness (Stefen Laszczuk, Wakefield Press, $22.95 pb, ISBN 1862546495, November)

Recipient of the best unpublished manuscript award at this year’s Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature, Stefan Laszczuk’s novel The Goddamn Bus of Happiness is a quirky and unusual piece of writing. The story centres on 28-year-old Mico—unemployed, uneducated, going nowhere except the local pub. His life revolves around partying with his no-hoper friends, tending to his sick girlfriend and acting as a liaison between his strict parents and his wayward teenage sister. Things become a bit more exciting when his best mate hits on a sure-fire plan to net them big money—and it all goes wrong. Laszczuk’s characters inhabit a gritty modern suburbia, a place of boredom, alcohol abuse and petty crime. The novel’s strength is the voice it gives to working-class young men, a group often marginalised by writers. However, the plot is reminiscent of a B-grade Australian movie and I found many of the characters quite one-dimensional and hard to engage with. Described by its publisher as a Catcher in the Rye for the current day, this book is aimed at the younger end of the fiction-reading public. It is edgy and adventurous writing, but I doubt readers will identify Mico as a modern-day Holden Caulfield.

Becky Edwards is a bookseller at Bookcaffe in Perth

This review from Australian Bookseller & Publisher magazine is reproduced by kind permission of Thorpe-Bowker, a division of R R Bowker LLC. © Copyright 2004, Thorpe-Bowker