Book Review: ‘The Passenger Seat,’ by Vijay Khurana

THE PASSENGER SEAT, by Vijay Khurana

“The Passenger Seat,” Vijay Khurana’s unsettling and powerful debut novel, follows two teenagers on the fragile cusp of manhood in a Canadian border town. Adam lives with his “failure” of a father, a former boatbuilder now delivering pizza, and hasn’t seen his mother in six years. Teddy’s well-off family is ostensibly functional but atomized, his mother barely concealing her affair, his father in blithe denial. Teddy is handsome, socially accepted and has a girlfriend he’s not particularly close with, a source of envy for Adam, who repels the opposite sex with his coarse appearance and coarser manners.

Thus, the classic Ferrantean dyad of the volatile working-class friend and the more privileged, introspective observer with whom the reader — and, invariably, the introspective, observant author — identifies. But whereas Ferrante and other writers confine us to the point of view of the softer character, Khurana’s precise, subtle narration roves freely between both boys, and Adam’s interior life is as rich as Teddy’s.

The boys take a summer road trip north with no destination in mind, though Adam, the only one who can drive his truck, dreams of reinventing himself in the Arctic. Teddy, while ignominiously stuck in the titular passenger seat, does have a gun license, and he purchases a Chekhovian hunting rifle in the first act. After a moment of reckless escalation, the two go on the lam. If the inciting episode reads as an overdetermined proof of male one-upmanship, Khurana’s execution of it is nevertheless gripping. Things go pear-shaped, then the pear goes rotten as the boys harbor resentments, thwart each other and secretively plot.

Readers hoping for a rollicking back-seat hang with Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty will be disappointed. The author, courageously, doesn’t try to make his protagonists enjoyable company; their banter is seldom playful, and the spare dialogue is delivered without quotation marks, rendering the numberless chapters and long paragraphs even more hushed. Neither suffers from any discrete trauma, aside from their unhappy families, that might curry sympathy.