The Road to Nowhere: The Troubled Masculinity of The Passenger Seat
The Passenger Seat, Vijay Khurana. Biblioasis, 2025.
From the moment I saw a description of The Passenger Seat, it was a book I wanted to read. This line from the back cover, “A searing examination of male friendship and masculinity in an age of toxic loneliness,” was enough to hook me. It might not be for everyone, but for those interested in confronting loneliness, alienation, and a twisted male friendship, first-time novelist Vijay Khurana takes readers on a haunting journey from which there is no return.
The Passenger Seat is a pseudo-coming-of-age and road trip novel. It follows Adam Velum and Teddy Anscombe, two teenage “boys, or men” living in an isolated town in the Pacific Northwest. In brief yet confident strokes, Khurana makes it clear that Adam and Teddy are troubled, unsure of who they are and what to do with their lives. Adam lives with his single dad, Michael, a former alcoholic. He plays a military-themed video game called Patriot and embraces the zero-sum thinking of a “book that teaches, among other things, how to win arguments against people,” as well as the conspiratorial words of “the bearded guys he subscribes to.” Teddy, seemingly more popular, is troubled by the knowledge that his mom Elizabeth is having an affair, and he doesn’t have a driver’s licence. Although Teddy has a girlfriend, he fluctuates between pride at this fact and worrying that he can’t sexually please her. He’s “not thrilled at the prospect of manhood” and “shopping for shortcuts,” which draws him to Adam. When Adam suggests that they “vanish” on a road trip “all the way to the Arctic,” Teddy puts up minimal opposition. They leave in Adam’s truck, with few supplies and a rifle bought for no clear reason.
The presence of the rifle foreshadows the violence to come. Khurana has been open about how his novel takes inspiration from a series of murders that took place in Northern British Columbia the summer of 2019. If one is familiar with those events, you might have some sense of the plot, but it takes nothing away from the telling. Adam and Teddy’s story feels fresh, while also owing a debt to male-centric writers like Norman Mailer. There are parallels with Mailer’s Why Are We in Vietnam? (1967), a novel of two friends discovering themselves while on a hunting trip with one of their fathers in Alaska. The Passenger Seat even opens with an apocryphal quote from Mailer: “When two men say hello on the street, one of them loses.” Khurana uses this epigraph to telegraph that one of the novel’s concerns is the schizophrenic dichotomy of many male friendships: win-lose, love-hate, intimacy-distance. The opening chapter lays out this interplay between Adam and Teddy, as they stand on a “steel truss bridge . . . near-naked,” balancing “barefoot on the safety railing,” where they “hold tight . . . look at each other and down” before plunging into the river. When they surface, both “privately hope someone will drive past and notice them occupying the space beside the bridge.” This “game” is the prototype for all the games they engage in on the trip.
The performative nature of masculinity is something that Khurana captures with skill. At one point, concealed in the trees, Teddy watches Adam spray his head with bug spray: “He would laugh if Adam knew he was watching. But because he doesn’t there is no point acting like an audience.” At a moment of tension, involving the rifle, Adam muses: “Before anything else this may be, it is a performance.” Some of the games Adam and Teddy play are innocuous ones — kicking orange peels into a swamp. But the sense of one-upmanship cuts to the core when Teddy tries to show Adam how to shoot and Adam tries to teach Teddy how to drive. Each feels insecure at their inability to do something “masculine.” Doubly so, because their friend can. At times, the games turn incredibly serious, and in the aftermath one wonders who’s really in “the passenger seat.” Teddy? Adam? Both? Both start “unconsciously paring their sentences, seeing how minimal they can make them and still be understood.” Teddy employs the phrase “let’s get the fuck,” while Adam’s mantra “fun and games” is a way of distilling hard-to-articulate feelings, plus a middle finger to the world. All this creates a degree of intimacy — Khurana also blurs identities with no quotation marks or distinct paragraphs for dialogue — yet the games and clipped language simultaneously stave off greater intimacy.
There is something mythic about this story, but the setting is sketched with enough verisimilitude to match the characters. Khurana’s prose is economical, sometimes knowing, sometimes deliberately uncertain. The landscape is never idealized, rather, a river is “darker and more muscular” than the one in town, and instead of “mountains or jewel-coloured lakes,” they experience “trashed-up gravel track[s] beside murky water.” When Adam and Teddy reach a certain destination, and they literally strip away their inhibitions, the reader is primed to expect a certain ending. But instead of sticking with Adam and Teddy, Khurana jumps forward in time, moving into the perspective of Ron, Elizabeth’s affair partner, and depicts his fiftieth birthday and relationship with his friend Freeman. This is a bold choice that leads to broader implications. Through Ron, we learn just enough about what happened to Adam and Teddy. But this isn’t the point. Ron and Freeman are counterpoints to Adam and Teddy. While seemingly “better” men, how much better? What distinguishes a “good” man from a “bad” man? Can we learn something from “bad” men? These are the provocative questions Khurana asks the reader.
The Passenger Seat was released in March 2025, the same time the show Adolescence was released. I see these works in different mediums as companion pieces. They examine alienation and the toxic forces of the internet acting on the minds of young boys and men, the sometimes violent consequences, and the fallout for families, authorities, and media. On the surface, I have little in common with Adam and Teddy, but having read the novel twice, I recognize some of their insecurities and longing for emotional connection in myself. I’d argue there’s a little of Adam and Teddy in every man.
Vijay Khurana is a writer I’ll be watching closely. The Passenger Seat, while no light read, is a genuine artistic statement — a simple story with deep resonances. While Adam and Teddy take the road to nowhere, this story might take the rest of us somewhere, somewhere better.
— Brandon Fick received his MFA in Writing from the University of Saskatchewan in 2022, has published fiction and poetry in Toronto Journal, Hart House Review, and El Portal, and is slowly attempting to write a novel.
Read this review and many others in Issue 307 (Spring 2026). Order the issue now:
Order Issue 307 - Spring 2026 (Canadian Addresses)
Order Issue 307 - Spring 2026 (International Addresses)
