Unsettling and powerful ... Precise, subtle ... The author, courageously, doesn’t try to make his protagonists enjoyable company; their banter is seldom playful, and the spare dialogue is delivered without quotation marks, rendering the numberless chapters and long paragraphs even more hushed ... Admirably resists a lurid climax befitting Patriot, instead offering an extended coda about a minor character alluded to early on.
Nell Zink is an idiosyncratic writer ... Delightfully surprising lines are frequent ... Zink’s narration is cool, her humour is dry and her dialogue is convincing. But the promise of her characters’ quirkiness doesn’t in the end add up to much. Despite its early intrigue, the story feels disappointingly quiet by the end.
Quietly frightening ... Inhabits both characters’ states of mind, at times mesmerizingly, depicting their braggadocio, their resentments and their paranoia ... The book’s unknowns conjure a deep disturbance in the condition of male friendship.
A challenging novel that pushes against the elastic comfort of the expected, The Passenger Seat tests what makes a boy turn into a man and arrives in a territory both unexpected and certain.
