In Vijay Khurana’s moody, propulsive debut novel, The Passenger Seat, it is Teddy who sits in the passenger seat as his friend Adam drives north. Teddy and Adam are teenagers in a small unnamed town on the west coast of Canada who have just finished high school. Bored and agitated, they are waiting for something to happen. Teddy, the more handsome and socially capable member of the duo, “is not thrilled by the prospect of manhood, but he has not yet settled on an alternative. He is shopping for shortcuts.” Maturation is laced with anxiety; “How can he avoid being left behind?” he asks himself.
The road trip north is Adam’s idea. He turns over “the idea of having gone as far as anyone can go”; Teddy “imagines the two of them arriving in a place where they were the other’s only family”. When the boys leave town, Teddy makes a stop to buy a gun; the reader quickly grasps that the road ahead will be violent and that these two boy-men will not grow up.
The friendship between Adam and Teddy is still finding a form, and The Passenger Seat charts their early intimacy and its acceleration on the road. Adam is a bit of a creep, a boy who turns to books and podcasts for advice on how to dominate the girls in his social group. He lives with his father and the topic of his mother is off limits. Both boys are struggling to respond to the cues emitted by their unruly bodies; they at once desire independence from family and long for the safety of its embrace.
In an extraordinary first scene that prefigures the novel’s thematic preoccupations, and its tragic denouement, we are told that the boys “crave witness, someone who will remember seeing them wet and shining in the summer sun”. The narrator is their sombre witness, memorialising Teddy and Adam’s doomed intimacy, switching between their points of view, and often seeing far more than they do. The present-tense narration is deceptively simple and occasionally reveals itself to be retrospective, such as descriptions of security footage of the boys leaving a store, pulled from the future. We know how this story will end, and it’s not long before Teddy and Adam do too. For all that the climax is inevitable, the narrative remains almost unbearably tense as the boys wrestle with their opposing desires for connection and for independence.
There is a coda to The Passenger Seat, another story of a dysfunctional male friendship adjacent to Teddy and Adam’s. Here we are in the company of a lonely man who tells anyone who asks that he “used to be close” to Teddy’s family. He is celebrating his 50th birthday by getting drunk with a friend, the ironically named Freeman, and reflects on his loneliness, on his desire to be a loving father and a loved son. He crashes out on his friend’s couch, just as Teddy did on Adam’s – a melancholy projection of the lives the boys might have led.
This is as strong an Australian debut as I’ve read in years: confident, precise and simmering with intellectual energy. The Passenger Seat flirts with allegory but never renounces an urgent relationship to contemporary configurations of masculinity. Young men like Teddy and Adam are the subject of relentless public fascination. They are the guys who listen to Joe Rogan, watch Andrew Tate, read Jordan Peterson and voted for Donald Trump. Khurana grants Teddy and Adam their measure of humanity, but not redemption.
Khurana is part of a cohort of Australian writers whose literary practice has taken shape outside Australia. Long on the expat beat, he has undertaken postgraduate studies in writing in the UK and won several awards for his short fiction there. The Passenger Seat was published in the US before it appeared in Australia. He is, in other words, a writer who has matured outside the networks and institutions that sustain most Australian debuts. Perhaps that accounts for his startling reinvigoration of long familiar tropes of Australian fiction: discontented young men, adolescent lassitude, the suppressed violence of regional towns, the cruelty of the wide, open road. Instead of sentimentalising Teddy and Adam and their milieu, Khurana has made of them a novel that is as original as it is timely.
The Passenger Seat by Vijay Khurana is published by Ultimo ($34.99) in Australia and Biblioasis (US$22.95) in the US
