The Passenger Seat

Traversing the journey between boyhood and manhood, teenagers Adam and Teddy drive away from their small town into an unplanned and unravelling escape. Aiming perhaps for hot springs, or maybe the Arctic Ocean, their future is entirely uncertain – while they have a map to navigate the highways of their road trip, navigating their masculinity is less easy. Their friendship is characterised by a desire to both impress and outmatch one another, a tension held at an uneasy balance as they talk sex, drink bourbon, teach each other to drive and shoot rifles. Precariously, their faith in each other, in manhood, develops, and neither is sure what this means.

In an attempt to prove something, anything, they make a mistake that they cannot undo. Two vulnerable boys, fuelled by intimacy and fear, descend into a violence of which they did not know they were capable. Like the rest of their friendship, this violence is a game, necessitating a winner and a loser, leaving them unsure if they are on the same side. To read this novel feels like a constant acceleration, like putting your foot on the pedal and realising you do not know how to take it off. Your only choice is to speed into an inevitable crash.

Vijay Khurana handles this tension with mastery. In his hands, performative masculinity gives way to a cruelty that is reasonless, but never meaningless. Yet within this cruelty, there is always hope – moments of vulnerability, of courage, of repentance, of love. Through showing us the worst of masculinity, we are also allowed to glimpse the best of it – what it could be. These moments are the beating heart of the novel, propelling us through the all-too-real crisis of masculinity, showing us our way out of it.