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CBC
23-05-2025
- CBC
Vijay Khurana's novel asks what we can learn from young men who murder
In Vijay Khurana's novel The Passenger Seat, he tells a story about high school friends Teddy and Adam. Not yet men, but no longer boys, they set off on a road trip in search of freedom and self-discovery. But the further they go, the more lost they become, until they head down a road from which there's no coming back. The Passenger Seat draws on aspects from the 2019 real-life manhunt for two men from Vancouver Island who murdered three people in northern B.C. — with no traceable motive. "I don't think that I have specific answers about how young men behave in these ways," said Khurana on Bookends with Mattea Roach. "That's one of the reasons why I know that fiction is my home rather than something else. Because I'm less interested in answering questions than asking them, and I'm more interested in exploring something without necessarily having to come to a black and white conclusion." He joined Roach to delve into what questions he raises in The Passenger Seat and the threads of reality that shape his fiction. Mattea Roach: Your novel partly draws on these real events that happened in 2019 in British Columbia, where there were these two young men that committed this series of violent crimes that sparked a nationwide manhunt across essentially the northern reaches of this country. It was a huge story for us here and made headlines around the world. When did you first hear about it? Vijay Khurana: I think that I actually first heard about it, or at least it probably sort of entered my consciousness a little while after those events had sort of taken place. A few months later. I had the similar reactions to probably what a lot of people had — just sort of a sense of shock, but also a sense of sort of unsurprise as well, because it was sort of the latest in what is a long series of especially young men committing acts of violence. But for me, it also really kind of touched me in a very specific way because I had been writing a lot of short stories about male friendship and the way that young men kind of move through the world and perform their masculinity and things like that. So it really struck a note with me for those reasons as well. What was your engagement with writing about male friendship and masculinity? What was it about that kind of bond that you felt was rich territory for fiction? As a fiction writer, a lot of what I'm interested in is just something that I don't understand, sort of trying to use fiction to explore things that don't quite seem to make sense to me in the world. I would definitely not call myself a political writer or a writer who's interested in engaging in political issues. Of course, male violence is is a political issue. But for me, I was trying to get to the bottom of some aspects of masculinity that I saw around me and even that I saw in myself and that I remembered from being a young man, years earlier. What similarities might there be between those sorts of "terrible men" and the rest of us, essentially normal, if flawed men? - Vijay Khurana Especially these ideas of the performance of masculinity, the way men see themselves reflected in other men and the ways in which game playing can come into the way men treat other people. In terms of psychological games and power dynamics. I had this fundamental question, which was, I wonder if there's a way to use fiction to — not answer the question — but just to explore this question of what kinds of people would be capable of doing something like those two teenagers did. But then also a much more troubling and difficult question: what similarities might there be between those sorts of "terrible men" and the rest of us, essentially normal, if flawed men? I want to talk about the two characters specifically, these two teenagers, Adam and Teddy. It's the summer before their final year of high school. They're taking off on this unplanned road trip. They are similar and yet different in so many ways. How did you develop these two guys in parallel? I started out with the desire to portray a friendship first and foremost, more than two individuals, and I thought a lot about my own friendships at that age. I thought about the ways in which sometimes, especially as a younger person, you can be thrown together with someone who isn't at all like you, but there can still often be quite an intensity to your relationship. I started out with the desire to portray a friendship first and foremost, more than two individuals, and I thought a lot about my own friendships at that age. I wanted to, from the very beginning, I really wanted to play around with the idea of the passenger seat versus the driver's seat. So asking myself always, who's in control and who's along for the ride, who's being passive and who's being dominant. I think that Adam is, certainly on the face of it, the more dominant one. He has a clearer sense of his own masculinity, even though it's quite a dark sense because he reads these books that are aimed at influencing young men and he spends time in various corners of the Internet. And then Teddy is much more passive. He is unclear about what he wants from his own manhood or adulthood, and on the face of it at least, he seems to be the one who's more along for the ride. What is the draw for Teddy as this guy who, in many ways, seems like he's more set up for success. What is the appeal of Adam for Teddy? Why do they end up drawn together in this way? Yeah, Teddy is a handsome kid whose parents are well off enough. He's by all indications a fine student, but I think that one thing he gets from Adam is almost a reason or an excuse not to sort of firmly cross the line into manhood or adulthood. Because I think he's quite afraid of that. He's afraid of what his relationship with his girlfriend might mean if he began to take it seriously. It gives him an excuse to reject the kind of manhood that he feels is maybe being offered to him. - Vijay Khurana And he's afraid of where he might be in five or ten years. I think that, for him, being friends with Adam, who quite firmly rejects a lot of what you might call traditional ideas about what a young man might do after high school, it gives him an excuse to reject the kind of manhood that he feels is maybe being offered to him.
Hamilton Spectator
19-05-2025
- Hamilton Spectator
Drawn from the dark: How shocking B.C. killings spurred by new novel written thousands of miles away
Canada doesn't often serve as a foreign writer's muse; indeed, even Canadian writers often look elsewhere for inspiration . Yet author Vijay Khurana, an Australian based of late in Berlin and London, was drawn — from thousands of kilometres away — to news of a bloody tragedy in British Columbia. That led to 'The Passenger Seat,' his debut novel published in March, about two young men on a car trip and the increasingly shocking, violent choices they make. The book has been hailed by critics and anointed as a New York Times Editors' Choice. Here, Khurana explains what attracted him to the real-life crimes of Canada's Bryer Schmegelsky and Kam McLeod, and how his own past, surrealism and video cameras entered the mix. In the summer of 2016, I was on holiday in France and found myself by a river, watching a group of boys jump from a high rock into the water below. The river was shallow, alarmingly so. It reached no further than the knees of most of the other bathers. The rest of us looked on with a mixture of fascination and alarm as the local teenagers, shouting and laughing, jumped from a height of several metres. Even though the boys must have known that the river below the rock was deeper than elsewhere, it still seemed like utter stupidity. And yet I knew why they were doing it. They were doing it for the same reasons that I had forced myself to jump from similar heights when I was their age. Beyond the thrill of vertigo, there was surely also a subliminal urge to exhibit courage, a desire for status within a group, and a desire simply to be watched, especially by the girls who were sunning themselves on the opposite bank. That scene, and the thoughts that came with it, stayed with me, and over the next few years, I found myself writing a series of short stories about friendships between young men, some of which involved violence. I was interested in how men perform their masculinity for other men, and how that performance affects how they treat those around them, especially women. I had begun to think about exploring these ideas in a longer work, a novel, when I read about two teenagers who had killed three people while on a road trip in Canada, before killing themselves as well. Bryer Schmegelsky, left, and Kam McLeod are seen in this undated combination handout photo provided by the RCMP. The two youong British Columbia men led police on a cross-Canada manhunt in 2019 and died by what appears to be suicide by gunfire. I first learned about the 2019 British Columbia killings , in which two Canadian men not yet 20 years old killed three people in a week, some months after they had taken place. The case was both shocking and sadly unsurprising, because of the regularity with which young men commit such acts of violence. But it immediately burrowed into me, because it resonated so strongly with the questions I had been grappling with in my stories, especially when it came to the connections between male violence and male friendship. I wanted to know more about the types of young men who were capable of doing something like that, and what — if anything — they might have in common with the rest of us. I knew that I needed to do more than observe male violence from the outside, like the many media reports and opinion essays I saw online. The writer Émile Zola once compared writing fiction to the work of a scientist in a laboratory. Discussing two of his protagonists, he said that his task had been 'to plunge them together into a violent drama and then take scrupulous note of their sensations and their actions.' That was what I planned to do with my own characters, in order to explore what I saw as something dark and difficult about masculinity. The novel I began writing was informed by the real events I had read about, but also by the short stories I had written, by the fiction I was thinking about at the time (a wide range of stuff, from Ottessa Moshfegh to Dostoyevsky), and of course by my own experiences of male friendship. A transposed version of the scene I had observed by the river in France became the opening chapter. As I wrote, I found that my characters bore less and less resemblance to the Canadian perpetrators I had read about. And yet there were details from the real case that I felt were vital to the story I was telling. RCMP search an area near Gillam, Man. in this photo posted to their Twitter page on Tuesday, July 30, 2019, amid the hunt for Kam McLeod and Bryer Schmegelsky. One of these was the road trip itself, which is as much about the claustrophobia of the vehicle as it is about the freedom of the open road. That juxtaposition of freedom and confinement seemed key to how the relationship between my characters influenced the actions of each individual. The road trip is often associated with 'coming-of-age' stories, and certainly the most meaningful journeys I remember are those I took with a male friend in Australia in the 2000s, when I was around 20 years old. I remember the comfort of companionship and the heightened thrill of shared experience, but also the boredom and irritation that could well up over hours spent in a car with somebody. Thinking back to those road trips, it felt like I had been driving both towards and away from the adult life that lay beyond the horizon. And that too felt important to the story I was telling: the sense that if someone is not prepared to accept masculinity as it is offered to them, they might improvise their own, twisted version of it. Other details from the real-life events also became part of the fiction. One was the use of a video camera used by my characters to document and narrativize, an emblem of their obsession with being observed, as though they could only understand themselves when they imagined being viewed from the outside. Another was a juvenile attempt to disguise a car so as to evade the authorities, which brought to mind the logic of very young children who clumsily aim to conceal their missteps in the hope that they might go unnoticed. I had read about surrealist Roger Caillois's categories of play, one of which is make-believe, pretending to be something you are not. Details like the disguising of the car and the characters' interest in video games were a way to draw a connection between these harmless aspects of game-playing and a much darker kind of play, in which young men move through the world with an artificially elongated sense of the distance between actions and consequences, and frequently treat those around them as playthings. Vijay Khurana, author of 'The Passenger Seat.' Ultimately, 'The Passenger Seat' is not a retelling of any true events, nor does it come to any comforting conclusions about any of the recurring instances of male violence that happen in our society. What I hope it does do is explore some troubling aspects of masculinity in a way that couldn't have been done by sticking to facts, to what was observable from the outside. Fiction seldom answers its own questions, but that is also one of its strengths when it comes to engaging with the dark and the difficult. It is meditative rather than calculative, it embraces the ambiguity, complexity and contradiction of human consciousness, and it leaves the reader with more thinking to do. 'The Passenger Seat' by Vijay Khurana is published in Canada by Biblioasis.
Toronto Star
19-05-2025
- Toronto Star
Drawn from the dark: How shocking B.C. killings spurred by new novel written thousands of miles away
Canada doesn't often serve as a foreign writer's muse; indeed, even Canadian writers often look elsewhere for inspiration. Yet author Vijay Khurana, an Australian based of late in Berlin and London, was drawn — from thousands of kilometres away — to news of a bloody tragedy in British Columbia. That led to 'The Passenger Seat,' his debut novel published in March, about two young men on a car trip and the increasingly shocking, violent choices they make. The book has been hailed by critics and anointed as a New York Times Editors' Choice. Here, Khurana explains what attracted him to the real-life crimes of Canada's Bryer Schmegelsky and Kam McLeod, and how his own past, surrealism and video cameras entered the mix. In the summer of 2016, I was on holiday in France and found myself by a river, watching a group of boys jump from a high rock into the water below. The river was shallow, alarmingly so. It reached no further than the knees of most of the other bathers. The rest of us looked on with a mixture of fascination and alarm as the local teenagers, shouting and laughing, jumped from a height of several metres. Even though the boys must have known that the river below the rock was deeper than elsewhere, it still seemed like utter stupidity.
Chicago Tribune
10-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Chicago Tribune
Biblioracle: ‘Passenger Seat' taps into a present-day anxiety about young men
Some novels feel not so much written as conjured, as though the author has absorbed something from the larger ambient culture and distilled it into the characters and narrative. The result is like being put under a spell, an invitation to join some other mind in a shared dream. Not all books necessarily intend to do this, but when it happens, it can be a startling and powerful experience. For me, 'The Passenger Seat' by Vijay Khurana had this effect, and even days after finishing it, I find it invading my thoughts as though it has taken some kind of lasting root. On the surface, it fits with some of the present zeitgeist as embodied by the Netflix phenomenon 'Adolescence.' 'The Passenger Seat' is the story of a pair of teenage boys inexplicably and inextricably attracted to and undone by violence, but because we're talking about a novel, rather than a television show, we have an opportunity to get much closer to these boys and that closeness becomes compelling and also unsettling. The boys are Teddy and Adam, growing up in small-town Canada. Adam is something of an outcast, a lousy student, indifferently parented, and an apparent believer of certain 'manosphere' tropes that alienate him from the girls whose attention he desperately craves. Their scorn is more agreeable than being ignored. Good-looking Teddy is polite to adults and comes from an intact home (though his mother is having an obvious affair) with an older sister on her way to college. He has a girlfriend he is constantly worried about alienating, not knowing what's expected of him by her or the world. It's not clear why he is attracted to Adam beyond the fact that each boy senses a kind of unconditional acceptance from the other. Almost, but not quite spontaneously, Adam and Teddy take off in Teddy's truck, heading north, maybe to the arctic, maybe to just get out of town for a bit. Adam is the one with the driver's license and the vehicle, while Teddy has the gun safety course permit, which allows him to buy a hunting rifle on their way out of town. Once the gun shows up, I was reading the novel through (metaphorical) parted fingers waiting for its use, and when the incident happens, there is a sinister scrim over every moment. These are not two romantic outlaws being free but a couple of doomed boys. Or maybe they're men. When referring to the pair, Khurana uses a repeated incantation 'these boys, or men,' suggesting the liminal space Adam and Teddy occupy, the confusion both the reader and they themselves have over their identities. The close third-person narration, which swings between Adam and Teddy section to section, deftly reveals the conflicts that roil within them. The story is empathetic to these characters without being sympathetic or exculpatory of their actions. I particularly admired a closing section which serves as a coda, told from the point of view of a truly peripheral character that at first feels disorienting, but by the end reveals a kind of core fragility of the male self that apparently makes it so vulnerable to both self-sabotage and the destruction of others. The novel's conclusion is both quiet and searing. There is simultaneously no explanation and a million explanations for the actions of these boys, or men. If anything, the shorthand marketing copy of 'a searing examination of male friendship and masculinity in an age of toxic loneliness' gives short shrift to what's happening here. This is a novel about not just these boys, or men, but the world that gives rise to them. John Warner is the author of books including 'More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI.' You can find him at Book recommendations from the Biblioracle John Warner tells you what to read based on the last five books you've read. 1. 'The Lost Tomb' by Douglas Preston 2. 'The Second Sleep' by Robert Harris 3. 'The Indian Card: Who Gets to Be Native in America' by Carrie Lowry Schuettpelz 4. 'The Premonition: A Pandemic Story' by Michael Lewis 5. 'The Screwtape Letters' by C.S. Lewis — Jim H., Norridge Here's a book I haven't thought about in quite a while, but whose mystery and quiet, but powerful emotion feels right to me, 'Out Stealing Horses' by Per Petterson. 1. 'Untamed' by Glennon Doyle 2. 'Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear' by Elizabeth Gilbert 3. 'The Business of Being a Writer' by Jane Friedman 4. 'The Turnout' by Megan Abbott 5. 'The Girl on the Train' by Paula Hawkins — Liza P., Chicago Looks like Liza might like something rich with suspense: 'Little Pretty Things' by Lori Rader-Day. 1. 'James' by Percival Everett 2. 'More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI' by John Warner 3. 'The Wedding People' by Alison Espach 4. 'Dream State' by Eric Puchner 5. 'The Brothers Karamazov' by Fyodor Dostoevsky — Allison T., Gurnee Given the impeccable taste of this reader, I better come through with a good one: Here's a strange and wonderful book, 'May We Be Forgiven' by A.M. Homes. Get a reading from the Biblioracle Send a list of the last five books you've read and your hometown to biblioracle@
The Guardian
17-04-2025
- General
- The Guardian
The Passenger Seat by Vijay Khurana review – a startling road trip as original as it is timely
In Vijay Khurana's moody, propulsive debut novel, The Passenger Seat, it is Teddy who sits in the passenger seat as his friend Adam drives north. Teddy and Adam are teenagers in a small unnamed town on the west coast of Canada who have just finished high school. Bored and agitated, they are waiting for something to happen. Teddy, the more handsome and socially capable member of the duo, 'is not thrilled by the prospect of manhood, but he has not yet settled on an alternative. He is shopping for shortcuts.' Maturation is laced with anxiety; 'How can he avoid being left behind?' he asks himself. The road trip north is Adam's idea. He turns over 'the idea of having gone as far as anyone can go'; Teddy 'imagines the two of them arriving in a place where they were the other's only family'. When the boys leave town, Teddy makes a stop to buy a gun; the reader quickly grasps that the road ahead will be violent and that these two boy-men will not grow up. Sign up for our rundown of must-reads, pop culture and tips for the weekend, every Saturday morning The friendship between Adam and Teddy is still finding a form, and The Passenger Seat charts their early intimacy and its acceleration on the road. Adam is a bit of a creep, a boy who turns to books and podcasts for advice on how to dominate the girls in his social group. He lives with his father and the topic of his mother is off limits. Both boys are struggling to respond to the cues emitted by their unruly bodies; they at once desire independence from family and long for the safety of its embrace. In an extraordinary first scene that prefigures the novel's thematic preoccupations, and its tragic denouement, we are told that the boys 'crave witness, someone who will remember seeing them wet and shining in the summer sun'. The narrator is their sombre witness, memorialising Teddy and Adam's doomed intimacy, switching between their points of view, and often seeing far more than they do. The present-tense narration is deceptively simple and occasionally reveals itself to be retrospective, such as descriptions of security footage of the boys leaving a store, pulled from the future. We know how this story will end, and it's not long before Teddy and Adam do too. For all that the climax is inevitable, the narrative remains almost unbearably tense as the boys wrestle with their opposing desires for connection and for independence. There is a coda to The Passenger Seat, another story of a dysfunctional male friendship adjacent to Teddy and Adam's. Here we are in the company of a lonely man who tells anyone who asks that he 'used to be close' to Teddy's family. He is celebrating his 50th birthday by getting drunk with a friend, the ironically named Freeman, and reflects on his loneliness, on his desire to be a loving father and a loved son. He crashes out on his friend's couch, just as Teddy did on Adam's – a melancholy projection of the lives the boys might have led. This is as strong an Australian debut as I've read in years: confident, precise and simmering with intellectual energy. The Passenger Seat flirts with allegory but never renounces an urgent relationship to contemporary configurations of masculinity. Young men like Teddy and Adam are the subject of relentless public fascination. They are the guys who listen to Joe Rogan, watch Andrew Tate, read Jordan Peterson and voted for Donald Trump. Khurana grants Teddy and Adam their measure of humanity, but not redemption. Sign up to Saved for Later Catch up on the fun stuff with Guardian Australia's culture and lifestyle rundown of pop culture, trends and tips after newsletter promotion Khurana is part of a cohort of Australian writers whose literary practice has taken shape outside Australia. Long on the expat beat, he has undertaken postgraduate studies in writing in the UK and won several awards for his short fiction there. The Passenger Seat was published in the US before it appeared in Australia. He is, in other words, a writer who has matured outside the networks and institutions that sustain most Australian debuts. Perhaps that accounts for his startling reinvigoration of long familiar tropes of Australian fiction: discontented young men, adolescent lassitude, the suppressed violence of regional towns, the cruelty of the wide, open road. Instead of sentimentalising Teddy and Adam and their milieu, Khurana has made of them a novel that is as original as it is timely. The Passenger Seat by Vijay Khurana is published by Ultimo ($34.99) in Australia and Biblioasis (US$22.95) in the US
