What would either of them be without the other to define him?
the passenger seat (vijay khurana, 2025)
The Passenger Seat (Vijay Khurana, 2025)
Two people who might otherwise go through life without ever causing trouble meet each other. Then, the magic of chemistry: trouble is there. Sometimes you see another person and you feel everything click into place. Sometimes it would have been better if it hadn’t ever clicked. Or maybe it was always going to happen; it was just your fate, which you would have met sooner or later, in a different moment, a different person, a different click, the same ending.
In Vijay Khurana’s The Passenger Seat, two teenage boys, Adam and Teddy, living in a dead end Canadian town, decide to take a summer road trip in the summer between their junior and senior years. Adam, whose mother has left him, is raised his depressed and broken father. He listens to podcasts, reads books on how to dominate the conversation, plays a game called “Patriot,” and drives his own car, a truck. Teddy’s family consists of a passive dad, a cheating mom, and an older sister who can’t wait to get out of this town. He can’t drive but he has a girlfriend. Adam doesn’t have a girlfriend and he never will. We meet them playing a game where they jump from a bridge into a river at the one precise place it’s deep enough not to break your neck:
A country road, a steel truss bridge, the sun heating stanchion and tarmac, river and soil, and the skin of two near-naked boys, or men. Dry air carries a hint of something burning far off; alders and cottonwoods, just past their greenest, are vivid against the grey water. The boys-or-men are friends, they balance barefoot on the safety railing, they hold tight, they look at each other and down. There is nervous laughter, a preparatory flexing of knees. Fun and games, says Adam, and they step out.
It’s the kind of idyllic boyhood summertime1 mix of one-upmanship and daredevilry you associate with movies like Stand by Me.2 Also, much like Stand by Me, Adam and Teddy will see a dead body in this book. More than one. With the crucial distinction, vis-a-vis other stories of boyhood, that Adam and Teddy will have killed these people.
When we meet them, the boys have no place they want to end up—not on the trip, not in life. (“How can he avoid being left behind?” Teddy frets. “They are all on their way somewhere: his friend, his girlfriend, his sister, even his mother. Teddy is not thrilled by the prospect of manhood, but he has not yet settled on an alternative.”) No, they don’t want to go anywhere, they just need to get out. They will drive up toward the Arctic, instead of toward the US–Canada border, because Adam, who listens to a lot of podcasts, believes the United States is falling into racial anarchy.3 That is not your first hint that there’s something wrong with Adam. At that point in the book, you’ve already read him casually inform a classmate he could strangle her and hide her body so she would never be found.
Yet it’s not really Adam that is the problem. It’s not Teddy either. It’s Adam-and-Teddy, the third thing born of their friendship. Adam’s podcasts could be a teenage edgelord phase, but Teddy gives Adam’s beliefs reality. Teddy wants to be a passenger on Adam’s nihilistic journey, but he’s not really as passive as he seems. The push–pull of who can and can’t drive, who has and has not made out with a girl, who does and doesn’t have a gun license, of a thousand constant tiny competitions, are essential to the creation of Adam-and-Teddy.4 Who’s in the passenger seat of this friendship? Both of them, that is: Adam and Teddy are going along. Who is driving? Neither of them, that is: Adam-and-Teddy is driving.
Khurana draws this friendship through alternating chapters that are told in a tight third person present tense, mostly from Adam or Teddy’s perspective. Every now and then there is a flicker of omniscience—“Adam, who will die a virgin, stands in the forest surrounded by dumb, indifferent organisms”—that gives the book a sense of cold predestination. You know that this trip will go badly. It does. You know they won’t come back. They don’t. It was that moment, though, the assertion that Adam will die a virgin, that rang a little bell for me: Muriel Spark. Was The Passenger Seat’s title a nod to one of Spark’s weirdest books, The Driver’s Seat?5
In The Driver’s Seat, a woman named Lise goes to Italy to seek out her own murderer. We are reminded throughout The Driver’s Seat that Lise will die a violent death: “Lise’s eyes are widely spaced, blue-grey and dull.… Her nose is short and wider than it will look in the likeness constructed partly by the method of identikit, partly by actual photography, soon to be published in the newspapers of four languages.” Spark depicts this baffling, off-putting situation in her usual way: aloof but intimate, knowing and cruel. What, exactly, causes Lise to seek her death is left a mystery, other than she understands she must meet her fate. The possibility that she is insane and a fool is never quite denied. At the moment she dies, you wonder if she’s ever been in control. Maybe she was in the grip of something that, in the last second, deserts her.
Perhaps because the characters of The Passenger Seat are worse, Khurana’s book is warmer. Even after they’ve crossed the line into murder, Adam and Teddy are familiar teenage boys. Their games could exist in an entirely benign way, in some other Canada and some other story. But the moment they buy a gun for their trip, you know what will happen. Yet somehow the inevitability of their murders makes their violence feel avoidable, right up until the last second. It always feel possible for them to do something else.
Adam, at least, is conscious that they must make the effort to create their own mythology so that people will continue to seek to understand them long after this trip is over. He deliberately creates meaninglessness as a way to make sure people will keep talking about them. It’s juvenile; it reveals an outsized sense of his own importance. He will ruin some people’s lives, but he has not created a puzzle that will guarantee his own immortality. At one point he leaves a playing card as a deliberate clue for people to debate later, but we’re told that in fact this clue will never be found:
When he gets back to the car he opens his wallet once more, takes out the playing card, and leaves it neatly on top of the pump, for the girl or somebody else to find. He imagines her trying to scramble her memories of him back once it becomes clear who he was, regretting not having paid more attention. But nobody finds the card. Sometime later the wind takes it, and it ends up in a puddle by the propane canisters, where it remains until the year’s first snow and long after that, as the boys’ names and faces fade from newspapers, from news sites, television, and radio, retreating into fissures of the internet where men, mostly men, divine and debate their motives, defend and damn them, or use them as evidence while arguing a crucial point.
But Adam is not the one with the gun license—that’s Teddy. Adam doesn’t buy the gun—that’s Teddy, too. It’s easy to say what’s wrong with Adam: podcasts, rabbit holes, radicalizing algorithms, “disinformation,” the entire laundry list of talking points. It’s called The Passenger Seat because what Teddy wants is to be taken for a ride, to give and to be given an excuse for violence.
***
I don’t think I heard a peep about this book once last year—which doesn’t tell you anything about its reception. (Every year the novels on the shortlists for prizes appear and every year I go: what are these.) I picked it up because it was the runner up in this year’s Tournament of Books and, after the first round, it kept winning even though it seemed like almost none of the people surrounding the ToB—not the official match commentators or the regulars in the comments—wanted it to advance.6 This dynamic tickled me and I thought: it’s a short book, why not give it a go?
The antagonistic commentary can, I think, be accurately summarized as “resenting being asked to think about violent young men.”7 There’s no arguing with what somebody does or does not what to spend time reading. In that sense: fair enough. Novels these days are often treated as preludes to a think piece; who needs yet another think piece that recites the various modes of online radicalization available to teenage boys? We already know the list. I get it.
For me, though, one of the major virtues of The Passenger Seat was that while it is clearly a book about alienated and violent young men, it’s not really concerned with explaining their world to me. That is its context, but not its content, much as Heavenly Creatures is not an anthropological study of New Zealand girlhood in the 1950s. Two people locked in a mutual fantasy and mutual complicity who are driving until they run out of road: that’s The Getaway Car, that’s Black Wings Has My Angel, that’s noir, that’s the Western. It is one of the great modern story structures and I doubt I’ll ever get tired of it. It’s the existential problem of where to go when you need to leave but have nothing to want and no place to aim. I read this book in two sittings; I finished it yesterday; I felt like I was vibrating. I needed to write about it as quickly as possible. I didn’t want to sit with it, I just wanted to discharge the energy.
Regardless of what happens between then and now—even if wins awards and moves copies—in twenty years The Passenger Seat will probably be reprinted and marketed as an underappreciated classic. However, you don’t have to wait twenty years. You can just appreciate it now.
I’m aware this is based on a book.
“They let the game’s plastic music run its loop and they lie there, not looking at each other, friends. That’s when Teddy makes the mistake of suggesting they drive south, across the border. No way, Adam says with surprising force, We’re going north. As though he has been waiting for the chance, he starts telling Teddy about failed states, about unsustainable multiculturalism, whatever that might be. When Adam talks like this, Teddy feels excited and uneasy in equal measure, like watching somebody do tricks with a knife. It is not a question of whether he agrees with Adam; he is not asked for his opinion. All he has to do is cling on for the ride, trusting he will end up somewhere he never expected…. You know about the sixty-percent rule? asks Adam. The sixty-percent threshold, he adds, remembering the proper word. That was a slip: now Teddy knows Adam is just repeating something said by one of the bearded guys he subscribes to. Teddy knows where Adam gets this stuff from, but it’s still a let-down when you catch out a conjuror. I’ve heard of it, lies Teddy, who knows he is about to be told anyway. Adam goes on: It’s when a society has no dominant culture anymore. If the biggest ethnic group is less than sixty percent of the total, bad things start happening—and guess where America is right now.”
Teddy, smugly reflecting on having a girlfriend: “From an early age he has been taught that to have something—a toy, a trophy—counts double if your friend has none.”
For instance, here is the first comment on the post where it was clear The Passenger Seat was advancing to the final round:
Usually I would quote people, but in this instance, given that both match commentary and normal commenting are forms of “shooting the shit with friends,” I think summary is a fairer way of representing it than direct quotation. Except for the screenshot in the above footnote, because… well… that was funny.