Vijay Khurana’s debut novel, The Passenger Seat, trails two late-teenage men, Adam and Teddy, as they drive north to reach the Arctic. Their largely aimless road trip shatters after a chance meeting with strangers. Once their encounter turns disastrous, the duo is inevitably sent on the run. As they drive deeper into unfamiliar terrain, the pair navigate their searching for adulthood, mercy and mortality.
In rhythm with the road, the third-person voice guiding the novel is neither close nor omniscient. It is through such a nerve meter of a narration that the sometimes switched-on, sometimes-vacant perspectives of the young men are reified as a reading experience. It could also be a tool to sketch the maturity of Adam and Teddy—or lack thereof—alongside their abdication of responsibility. This does not answer the question of why young men continue to commit such heinous acts, nor does the novel resolve to. The Passenger Seat puts faith in its readership to walk away from the book, to step out of the car if you will, and continue to question how turmoil ferments within our friendships and relationships and into abstract action.
There is an antecedent early on, a half-premonition, where the coiled energy of the young men’s violence is brought forward: ‘After some harmless back and forth, Adam decided to calmly tell Brianna he could strangle her and bury her body somewhere her family would never find.’ Such brash rendering of domestic violence and brutality does not attempt to normalise or make cold-blooded homicide commonplace. The narrator is neither judgmental nor neutral. There is little yearning for justification or reason. The result divulges a psyche that is more peculiar than lacking remorse or being in a state of denial. Adam and Teddy’s lives are also not pathologised, nor are their briefly mentioned childhoods cornerstoned with trauma. Instead, the present-tense storytelling tows the movement of their crossing, providing a disturbing insight into how such cruelty lingers beneath the fore.
In rhythm with the road, the third-person voice guiding the novel is neither close nor omniscient.
The Passenger Seat also eschews tropes of masculinity, while navigating its toxicity at the same time, neatly expressed near to the close: ‘Perhaps every man turns boy on his birthday, amid the indulgence and attention. Birthday privilege. But when is it not a man’s birthday?’ Again, the nuanced fluidity of the narrator, not entirely confident in himself either, sparingly personifies Teddy and Adam’s inner workings: their insecurities, their convictions, their confusion.
Comfortably seated and brazen, yet also not in control, it is Teddy, the character who rides for the most part shotgun, that can envisage the calamity that is almost ordained to them. Teddy is often projected through his counterpart Adam, and vice-versa, indicative of the malaise that is brewing. It is, after all, Teddy who commits the novel’s most chilling crime. It is within these defining and decisive moments—rather than the book’s (necessarily) idle ones—that Khurana maps the unexpected. They are also not overemphasised or melodramatic; nor are they bastardised into sensationalist kitsch. These passages are bled out with an emotionality that situates the reader precariously inside, on the uncertain ground the figures have placed and found themselves. This is balanced with the more quotidian, perhaps even banal patches of prose to let us sit and unpack with Adam and Teddy in the backseat of their truck or Toyota:
There will be time to lay out horror, pride, and envy side by side, with neat borders between them, as though they might grow and one day be harvested. There will be time to decide, to revise.
It was until the unexpected second act that I began to feel The Passenger Seat would work better as a novella or a long short story, if not a slow feature film (and I hope it does get adapted). Hitherto it seemed there was significantly more emphasis placed on the construction of sentences and the weaving of paragraphs instead of the clockwork of the narrative. This presumption was wrong.
The Passenger Seat eschews tropes of masculinity, while navigating its toxicity at the same time.
