By Declan Fry
FICTION
The Passenger Seat
Vijay Khurana
Ultimo, $34.99
Adam and Teddy, the two high-schoolers at the centre of Vijay Khurana’s debut, have limited social connections. They are – as the novel’s omniscient voice archly puts it – “boys, or men”, still cosplaying at being adults. Adam is hooked on gaming, metal bands, and life-advice promising wealth, power, and affectless dominance: the Darwinian myths of the manosphere, a world reduced to little more than a boring binary of doms and subs.
Their relationship is infused with competition and one-upmanship. Everything they say is guarded, designed to appease the other while not allowing oneself to become too vulnerable. Indeed, games – whether it is video games or women – seemingly exist mostly to facilitate their bond. Teddy’s girlfriend, Ceecee – one of his few human connections outside of Adam – is depicted as a source of pride, in part because she can help Teddy to impress or prove himself to Adam. Homoeroticism, Teddy reflects, is democratising.
Both have fractured home lives. Adam, it is suggested, iswhite; Teddy has non-white ancestry (India is hinted at, suggestively). The novel attributes a degree of openness to Teddy’s atomised family that Adam’s more distant one lacks. Adam’s parents are separated while Teddy’s remain together only because – so he says – to split would require talking to each other. Thus The Passenger cleverly navigates the world via the boys’ limited perceptions of it. Adam’s father, Michael, for example, is described as a “failure”. The attribute seems to be Teddy’s (or perhaps Adam’s) evaluation, given Michael has two jobs and is trying to stay sober.
During one of Adam’s first visits to Teddy’s house, we learn Adam has a capacity for violence. Confusion, shame, entitlement, and the desire for control or agency translate, for him, to powerlessness. He cannot stand being ignored. He has absorbed a zero-sum view of social relations: for you to win, someone else has to lose.
Seeking escape, the boys embark upon a road trip through Canada, heading north. Along the way, they buy a rifle, introducing Checkhov’s famous narrative principle: if a gun turns up in the first act, be sure to fire it in the third.
Australian author Vijay Khurana.
Encountering a travelling couple on the road, the pair kill them. The scene is a masterclass in tension, Khurana expertly handling the dynamics of interaction between the boys and their victims. His refusal to sensationalise – evoking a sense of lives whose tipping points cannot be planned in advance – recalls the control of Camus or Laurent Mauvignier’s home invasion novel, The Birthday Party.
It’s emblematic of the novel’s gift for concise, poignant evocation that it can summarise Teddy’s alienated, eerie relationship with Adam in ways that are both subtle and memorable (“Teddy is laughing, but he doesn’t feel like laughing”). Teddy is portrayed throughout as subordinate to Adam, eager to please and paralysed by fear of Adam’s judgment. Yet the anxiety with which Teddy relates to Adam is its own kind of vulnerability: Adam is the closest thing he has to meaningful human connection.
A certain style of commentary might wish to saddle these boys with familiar descriptors: toxic masculinity, incel, etc. Yet the irony is that the only real power the boys have is in their relationship with each other – a relationship that never has the chance to grow. Their alienation and fondness for digital mediation locates them within a tradition of frightening young men (think Michael Haneke’s Benny’s Video or Funny Games). But whether it’s metal music, gaming, or masculinity’s “toxicity”, it’s easier to blame an idea rather than a material structure for the condition of these boys’ lives – and a lost opportunity. To do so would mean committing the same mistake the boys do, consigning Adam’s father to the status of perpetual loser rather than having the compassion to recognise his struggle and its paradoxes.
In depicting the boys, Kharuna focuses on something many people experience during the journey from adolescence to adulthood: loneliness. He convincingly conjures a sense that things might have been different, if only the boys had been older, more capable of connection. The result is a truly marvellous novel, one that rewards being read multiple times.
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