The Passenger Seat

was interested in the way men often create or adopt narratives that may seem comforting but end up being harmful to themselves and people around them—especially when those narratives encourage them to think of themselves as tragic heroes and victims of injustice. It can happen in the context of ideology, and Adam in The Passenger Seat consumes things of that sort, including a book that is somewhere between self-help and a guide to manipulating people. But I think it goes beyond media and ideology.
The second part of the novel focuses on a character, Ron, who was only briefly mentioned in the first part. He has a tangential relationship to Teddy and Adam, and tells himself that he is a victim of their actions in a very specific way. But as the book draws to a close, we’re invited to question that narrative. I think there’s a similarity between Ron’s kind of narrativisation and the political narratives that Adam is buying into.
The question of there being a crisis in masculinity is also interesting to me. It’s so hard to argue against that being the case, but at the same time, ‘crisis in masculinity’ is inevitably a kind of short-hand, a simple label for a complex, intersectional and often ambiguous issue, and that’s something I was writing against with this novel. I think we need to keep hold of the complexity and the ambiguity, which is why I think fiction is a useful place to go to explore issues like this.