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.
