The Passenger Seat, the gripping debut novel by Australian-born writer and translator Vijay Khurana, is a book in two parts. In the first, teenaged Canadian schoolmates Teddy and Adam set off on an aimless road trip heading north. Adam is a tough loner who frequents some of the internet’s darker man-focused corners; Teddy, who is comparatively more stable (and has a girlfriend), remains grimly bonded to his friend – and not only because Adam is the one with a driver’s licence. As the two “boys-or-men” hit the road, the novel escalates into a series of shocking acts of violence.
The book’s second part is set in the aftermath of these events, following a pair of older men whose much more normal friendship offers haunting resonances of what transpired. We met up with Khurana to discuss his novel’s treatment of masculinity, friendship, violence and the road.
Congratulations on this wonderful novel! Has it been in the works for long?
I first realised that I wanted to write about young men and male friendship a long time ago, back in 2017, when I was doing a Master’s in creative writing in the UK. I noticed that I was writing a lot of short stories that were about men – young men who were around the same age as Teddy and Adam in the novel – and about the way they related to each other, with some of those stories including violence and similar themes as well.
I started thinking about this particular story in 2020, and then I drafted and redrafted it many times, often feeling like it was finished, only to then go and redraft it again. It was shortlisted for the Novel Prize in 2022, which led to me finding a publisher, and then a final round of edits. So I’ve been digging around these particular earthworks for quite a while.
The road trip is such a paradox. It has this sense of complete freedom, but it’s very claustrophobic
What drew you to the topic in the first place – politics, personal experience, something else?
I’m not, as a writer, particularly interested in mining a political issue, although of course it is a political issue. But I am very much interested in exploring something that doesn’t initially make sense to me – and in exploring something that doesn’t seem to be all that prevalent in writing, be it fiction or the kind of non-fiction that I usually read.
There are lots of amazing books about female friendship that are in some way comparable: books with that obsessive quality like Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh, books about homosocial friendships like Fleur Jaeggy’s Sweet Days of Discipline, and so on. Friendship between young men felt underrepresented to me. Another factor, of course, is that I personally have been a young man, and I have had friendships – which I still think about – that taught me a lot about my own sense of masculinity.
It’s very far from being an autobiographical book, but having had that experience, I was able to write myself in various ways. In terms of the subject matter, and the violence, it’s something that we keep hearing again and again in the media, and I wondered if there might be interesting questions that I could ask using fiction that weren’t being asked in other fora.
The events of your novel bear a very close resemblance to a real series of murders committed by two male teenagers in British Columbia in 2019. Those events triggered a huge amount of media attention, some of it rather lurid. Did you want your book to depart from the familiar narrative modes of news and true crime?
Yes, and the novel comments on the ways in which the news media tends to narrativise violence. I had already been interested in writing about the connections between male friendship and violence when I read about the story from Canada and I knew – especially on account of the road trip aspect – that there was something in it that resonated with my ideas.
The news media always aims to get more reads, more clicks, as many eyes and ears as possible, and that leads to certain kinds of narrativisation that don’t, I think, lead us to the really important questions about why this keeps happening and why young men so often do this.
If the perpetrators of these sorts of crimes get considered either as being led there by some trauma that they’ve experienced – or conversely, as being so completely monstrous that we could never really understand or learn from them as a society – then that’s the end of the road in terms of asking difficult questions. That allows us to stop thinking, because if we describe something as inhuman or incomprehensible, then we absolve ourselves of the responsibility to comprehend it.
The narrative perspective you adopt is really interesting; it is essentially outside of the boys, but it often moves in close to one of them – just long enough so we can hear one having a thought or noticing something about the other. Was this always what you wanted?
It was important to me early on that I would move between them, because I wanted to portray a friendship as much as any one character.
One of the key elements of the book is that these two young men learn to see themselves as reflected in others. And maybe that’s true of young men generally: that they understand their masculinity through others’ reflections of it, whether that’s a friend or an enemy or a rival or just someone who feels threatened by them on a train. With this perspective, I could have each of them seeing themselves reflected in the other – and in the other’s reactions to their actions.
I also didn’t want to fall into the task of trying to psychologise a murderer, because that wasn’t something I was interested in doing. I wanted to focus on the things I do know about: the performance of masculinity, the confines and claustrophobia of friendship, the act of game-playing. I also have these moments where the narration zooms out and looks down at the boys, as society might, commenting on them and being more judgemental of them, because that felt like what I had to do. I didn’t want to give anyone the sense that the book was revelling in this violence, or offering a thrill in the narrative of two young men on the run.
This idea of games and gamification runs all throughout the novel. We get references to childhood play, memories of toys, a certain violent video game; Adam repeats the phrase “fun and games” at increasingly grim moments…
I think game-playing among young men often results in men dehumanising those around them. If you are playing a game, then the object of your game – the toy – is dehumanised. I think young men often use others, those around them, as playthings, essentially.
The definition of play is something that has no purpose, something you cannot profit from. I was thinking a lot while writing the novel about Roger Caillois’s categories of play, one of which is a kind of vertigo, which also involves risk-taking. And the book begins with Teddy and Adam jumping off a bridge into water that looks dangerously shallow. The other types of play, according to Caillois, are sports, games of chance – gambling – and mimicry, as in role-playing or pretending. All of those are present, in one way or another, in the male characters in the book.
When play becomes a game, it takes on rules – it has a winner and a loser. It becomes about competition, and it becomes about the constant negotiation of what the rules are, who’s winning and who’s losing, who’s playing willingly and who’s being forced to play in some way. “Fun and games”, as you say, is something that Adam uses to tell himself that things don’t really matter.
There is also a sort of mediation going on, which separates you from the consequences of your actions, especially if they are violent. To treat everything like a game is to deny the possibility of consequences.
It seems that, at crucial moments, the boys push each other into not taking things seriously.
After Teddy does something really drastic and irreversible, that’s when Adam starts to push the idea that it doesn’t matter – because the alternative is to face a truth that I don’t think either of those characters is strong enough to face. In a sense, it’s about the ways in which people can re-narrativise what they’ve done and what’s happened to them. I’m most interested in thinking about how we might all do this in different ways – that re-narrativisation, the sense that no, we weren’t at fault, we were in the passenger seat rather than the driver’s seat.
Let’s talk about the road. There is a long tradition of the road novel, the road movie, which is associated with total freedom in a positive way. But here you seem to be flipping that on its head.
I’m really drawn to paradoxes. I find them to be incredibly fruitful. And the road trip is such a paradox. It has this sense of complete endless freedom, but at the same time, it’s very claustrophobic.
You can go anywhere you want, but actually you just sit on your butt all day and get bored, seeing the same things rolling past again and again. For a lot of young people, it’s often an early experiment in adulthood because you’re cohabiting with someone who might not be family and you’re buying and cooking your food and so on. But it is also always mediated by the windows and the windscreen of the car – you move through the world in this kind of bubble, which means you can go through as many towns as you want but you never have to stop and live there and experience what that’s like day to day.
The road trip is a coming-of-age trope, but in many ways it’s also the opposite of that: a real abnegation of the realities of adulthood. Not to mention the very obvious one that is just leaving and fleeing and going somewhere so that you don’t have to stay at home, which for Teddy and Adam is a big part of things.
If we describe something as inhuman or incomprehensible, then we absolve ourselves of the responsibility to comprehend it
You have a really dense, powerful, lyrical style here on the sentence level. How do you do it?
As a reader, and as a writer, I’ve always really loved sentences that have their own tensions, their own rhythm. There’s a great line in the Garielle Lutz essay The Sentence Is A Lonely Place about the sentence as the place where writing “attains its ultimacy”. I’m always trying to write sentences that have interesting qualities of their own, regardless of narrative, plot or character.
I love writers like Diane Williams, Christine Schutt, Garielle Lutz and many others whose sentences really live on the page like that. Here it was a sense of thinking to myself, if I’m writing a road trip, then I should also be writing as a road trip, in a way. So I tried at certain times to bring across the rhythms of the road in the prose – or if there was a moment of tension between Teddy and Adam, I tried to get that across in the consonants or the word endings or the length of the sentences, or in the way a sentence might shudder to a stop.
I think all those things are very important in getting feelings across in prose.
You’ve had quite a few different jobs over the years, and you’ve published some very well-received short stories. Was it always leading up to this – a novel?
Well, I’m not one of those writers who you hear say that they knew they wanted to be a writer from the age of eight and had written a bit of a novel at age 12. I always loved to read and did write a few things when I was young. But I ended up becoming a radio presenter in my twenties in Australia, and then I became increasingly interested in books and writing.
By the time I moved to Berlin in 2012, I had become very interested in short fiction, and I came to the conclusion that short stories were the superior form of fiction (laughs): the hardest form to get right, and the form with the most longevity in terms of staying with you as a reader after you’ve finished. I really love stories. But the ideas that ended up in this book just felt like they needed to be explored at greater length. I think you can tell it’s the novel of a short story writer.
I have not been in a very short-story mindset lately. I’m writing another novel now, and I’m quite excited by what that form can do. I spent years obsessed with the ideas and the characters of The Passenger Seat, which I eventually found quite exhausting, and now I’ve moved onto another thing I’m obsessed by, and hopefully I’ll just keep rolling on like that – from intellectual obsession to intellectual obsession.
- The Passenger Seat is out now in North America from Biblioasis and will be out in the UK from Peninsula Press on May 29.
