In the opening scene of The Passenger Seat, Vijay Khurana’s elegant debut novel, two teenagers teeter, nearly naked, on the rail of a steel truss bridge. Each boy peers surreptitiously at the other. Just as the thickening eroticism threatens to break the surface of their friendship, they plunge into the narrow river. On splashdown one boy smacks his foot, but the pain, like the eroticism, is evaded almost as soon as it is felt. “Fun and games,” the other boy remarks, a phrase that neatly captures the dissociation that has become their habit. 

Only a masterful portraitist of the tuned-out could deliver The Passenger Seat, a fully tuned-in record of a friendship’s headlong plunge into catastrophe. The novel also deals a body blow to the comfortable notion that the epidemic of gun violence has nothing to do with the socialization of young men who experience intimacy as a threat to be met with mindless, sadistic violence.

The teenagers on the bridge are Teddy Anscombe and Adam Velum, two friends who “have heard each other’s names for years, endured the same classrooms and joined the shifting social groups that form during breaks and on weekends.” Big, disruptive changes to this longstanding order are afoot. Teddy has a girlfriend with whom he is becoming close, threatening their boy-bond; Adam meanwhile has immersed himself in an online world of players of a first-person shooter called, ominously, Patriot, and is now falling deeper into conspiracy theories. This inseparable, combustible pair is going on a road trip, and to make matters (much) worse, one of the boys has a gun.

Shame and rage are the boys’ dominant emotional gears. Teddy is ashamed of his indigenous background, while Adam is ashamed of his father’s struggles with unemployment and alcohol dependency. They are both ashamed of their feelings for each other. When these shameful feelings are touched—for instance, by an observation that’s a little too on-the-nose—the reaction is a swift flight right off the handle. 

Throughout the novel Khurana puts Adam’s thinking on display, bringing the reader into his mind while keeping a critical distance from his point of view. “There is so much fakeness in the world, so many people willing to pretend the world is something it is not,” Adam thinks. Noting the falsehood in this remark, the narrator observes that Adam and his online buddies “guard this lie like territory.” In this they resemble nothing so much as the NPCs (non-player characters) of Patriot, the expendables who are written into the game and come along for the ride. To his foolish nihilism Adam joins a violent fatalism which he epitomizes in a mantra borrowed from a line from the Bible: “A whip for the horse, a bridle for the donkey, and a rod for the fool’s back.” 

Because Adam is still young enough to have trouble distinguishing himself from others to whom he is close, he is barely aware that he sees Teddy as an extension of himself. Together, Adam believes, they make a culture of two, the only people around who aren’t fools. Gripped by powerful, alternating feelings of proud contemptuousness and painful inferiority, Adam narrows their social circle to protect their special bond. His antics provoke their other friends, prompting bitter arguments—especially with young women whose intelligence he fears, though of course, he would never admit it. 

Keeping volatile feelings at bay is a constant mutual struggle. They punch each other, leaving bruises that are easy to joke about, diffusing the heat between them, yet their needs for intimacy are never far below the surface “fun and games.” They find themselves speaking to each other in ever shorter bursts, paring their expression to the least needed to be understood. Their communion is so intimate, it verges on wordless. “If they stayed together long enough,” the narrator offers, “they’d end up with their own language.” 

What might have saved them—the key skill of emotional regulation—is not part of their interpersonal toolkit. Instead they circle back, repeatedly, to their experiences of misbehavior and its consequences. “Teddy tries to tease Adam for landing in detention so much, and Adam finds himself talking about punishment.” Parroting the conspiracy theories he reads about, Adam says that “punishment is neither deterrence nor rehabilitation, but simply to make the victim feel like they are not along in their victimhood. It makes warped twins out of victim and perpetrator.” With his riff, Adam unknowingly opens a door. “Weird question,” Teddy says, in an apparent non sequitur. “[D]id you ever get hit? I mean spanked?” The question is not so much weird as fraught with vulnerability, memories of pain and humiliation that mingle, in memory and in the present, with desire. 

[Teddy] says the word spanked softly, as though he is unnerved by it. Adam laughs through his nose. What? No. You freak. Fuck off, Teddy says quickly, I mean as a punishment. Like by your parents. When you were little. […] Adam’s thoughts go to his own life at five and six, finding nothing he wants to share.

Teddy shares plenty, arguably for both of them: “At some point you realize that it doesn’t actually hurt, that it means nothing. I worked out that all I had to do was squeeze my ass cheeks together, I mean clench—and here Adam starts laughing—and then it didn’t hurt at all.” His mother hit him with such ferocity, she “ended up bruising her own hand.” When she reveals the bruise to his father, he only laughs. “He was on my side,” Teddy concludes, his satisfaction evident. “And she never did it again.” Masculinity is attained not merely through defiance but with another’s submission to a hardened exterior, the clenched buttocks becoming an emotionally cut-off young man. Adam’s response is notably, predictably, heartbreakingly avoidant:

When Teddy goes out to piss Adam looks into the sunset with his eyes closed, watching his eyelids wash with red and black. Something Teddy said made him feel afraid. He doesn’t know which bit exactly, or what the fear is, but he knows if they don’t keep moving he will sink into another layer of himself and will never be able to claw his way back up.

If this novel were simply a road trip gone wrong, it would still be a powerful portrait of the bond between two young men. But from the first moments, Khurana signals that his lens is wider than just one adolescent relationship. In the novel’s opening scene, as the boys jump from the bridge, an empty logging truck rattles by, a loud emissary from the adult world of economic hardship, trade wars and corporate greed. Meanwhile whiffs of distant fires suggest the relentless extraction of resources from the countryside and the dangers of neglected infrastructure, fragile power lines sparking over flammable uncleared brush. 

These larger themes come to the fore in the novel’s second part, told from the point of view of an adult who knows the boys and presents more complex, if no less grim, understanding of the tragedy that befalls them. With this striking novel, Khurana delivers a clear-eyed picture of the death-dealing form of masculinity euphemized as toxic and links its mindless violence to larger economic and ecological devastation. 

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Vijay Khurana is a writer and translator from German. The Passenger Seat, his debut novel, was shortlisted for the 2022 Novel Prize, while his short fiction has been recognized by numerous prizes and published in The Guardian and NOON, among others. He is currently completing a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing at Queen Mary, University of London. He lives between Berlin and London. 

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Diane Josefowicz is Book Reviews Editor at Necessary Fiction, Senior Editor of Translation at The Adroit Journal, and the author, most recently, of L’Air du Temps (1985), a novella published last year by Regal House. Her story collection, Guardians & Saints, is forthcoming in October from Cornerstone Press; her second novel, The Great Houses of Pill Hill (Little Place of Departed Spirits), is coming in 2026 from Soho Press.