The Passenger Seat (Vijay Khurana, Ultimo)

Beginning mid-jump and barely letting up the tension, Vijay Khurana’s debut novel, The Passenger Seat, is an unusual and deftly written literary thriller. It follows the uneasy friendship between two ‘boys-or-men’ who set out on a haphazardly planned road trip before their last year of school. The omniscient – almost documentary-like – narration shifts primarily between the perspectives of Adam and Teddy. Adam, thorny and hot-tempered, drives. Teddy, only slightly better adjusted but more submissive, rides in the passenger seat when he’s not impatiently taking driving lessons from Adam. With Teddy’s gun license, they buy a rifle, and the devastating consequences of this are no less shocking for being expected. Khurana’s prose enthrals, marked by a sharp social and sensory realism and a mature emotional intelligence. His ability to capture how physiological reactions often precede cognitive understanding is impressive, as is his unflinching portrayal of how young men interpret these reactions – often through a toxic lens. As Adam becomes increasingly hostile to those in his orbit, his story highlights how young men can drift into radicalisation through emotional detachment. Just as unsettling is the way Teddy absorbs and mirrors Adam’s domineering personality, pulling them both toward an inevitable breaking point. In Khurana’s hands, it’s a haunting exploration of modern masculinity. Reading this, I was reminded of Emma Cline’s The Guest for its bleak but subtly probing outlook, as well as Benjamin Myers’s short story collection Male Tears for its thematic parallels.

Books+Publishing reviewer: Melissa Mantle holds a Master of Arts in Literature and balances her bookselling work with going to the cinema as often as possible. Books+Publishing is Australia’s number-one source of pre-publication book reviews.

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