What do you think?
Black Bag
A penniless and out-of-work actor picks up a job working for Dr. Blend, a university professor who is conducting a psychological experiment. How will Dr. Blend’s students react to someone zipped into an oversized bag, sitting at the back of the lecture hall over a series of autumn-term lectures? The role, eagerly accepted, soon has unexpected consequences. A professor of post-humanism develops research questions of her own, in particular: can you love someone secreted away inside a black bag? Meanwhile, the actor’s childhood friend forms a vision for monetizing this new situation . . .
A warped campus novel, an investigation into the crisis of masculinity, and an off-kilter love story, Black Bag is a firework of a novel: blazingly funny and profoundly humane.
A warped campus novel, an investigation into the crisis of masculinity, and an off-kilter love story, Black Bag is a firework of a novel: blazingly funny and profoundly humane.
389 pages, Hardcover
First published March 17, 2026
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August 29, 2026
First Impressions
I just read "Black Bag" with my online book club, and it was such a pleasurable experience, both because the novel is genuinely fun and because it kept provoking deeper questions the whole way through, if you want to engage with it on that level. I also had the pleasure of interviewing Luke Kennard and we had a fun lengthy discussion about a wide range of subjects which you can watch here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIdBHDdJmN8
The novel has a wonderfully straightforward, almost absurd premise: an unnamed, down-on-his-luck actor takes a job in a university classroom for a psychological experiment, wearing a black bag that covers his entire body, unable to speak or interact with anyone. He's just a strange, silent presence in the room, and the experiment is designed to study the effects of that. We get his first-person account of it all, written as though it's unfolding in real time.
The premise is based on an actual experiment. In 1967, Charles Goetzinger at Oregon State University seated a figure in a black bag in his class to demonstrate the "mere-exposure effect," the idea that repeated proximity breeds affection, and watched his students move from hostility to curiosity to friendship over the course of a term. Kennard has said he came across it as a footnote in a social psychology article, and that he was more interested in the actor who took the job than in the finding itself. The real study recorded the students' reactions and left no account of the man inside the bag. Kennard gives us only the inside, updated for the present day and relocated to England.
A Man Who Wants Theatre on His Own Terms
I found the narrator endearing: his passionate love of theatre, his sensitive, arty English foppishness, and his pretensions and wry observations about the state of the current world. I pictured him as a young Hugh Grant. He considers theatre the highest art form and finds it genuinely bewildering that the rest of the world doesn't share his devotion to it, yet he can barely get work as an actor and has to default to dinner theatre and cheap detective-mystery performances just to pay the bills. There's a real contradiction in him that the novel is quietly aware of: he holds theatre up as the highest art and wants everyone to be as enthusiastic about it as he is, but when he does get more serious, socially engaged roles, he's just as critical of those as pretentious. He seems to want theatre to exist only on his own terms, which of course it can't, and that contradiction makes it entirely believable that once he takes on the role of Black Bag, he lets it feed his ego and become something much bigger than the psychological experiment it's meant to be.
So taking the job as Black Bag, with its steady salary, is a real relief for him financially, but it comes to mean far more than that. The day-to-day unfolding of it is consistently amusing: I could vividly picture the farcical sight of a man stumbling around in a black bag and the whole range of ways people react to him. But because we're experiencing it from his perspective inside the bag, I could also feel how physically uncomfortable, gross and restrictive it becomes, and how nerve-wracking it must be to be so conspicuous while being completely unable to respond to anyone. I love his observation that inside the bag it starts to feel as though his face and skin have become his internal organs. And against that discomfort, there's his growing psychological sense of freedom that comes from being completely anonymous.
Visibility, Anonymity, and the Internet Age
There's something pointed in the fact that the experiment anonymises the one figure least accustomed to it: a relatively handsome white Englishman in his mid-to-late thirties, exactly the type usually granted the centre of the room and the benefit of the doubt by default. Stripping that away becomes a kind of test of what happens when his usual privilege is removed, and how that changes both his sense of self and the way society interacts with him.
It also felt more personal to me than that. I'm naturally a fairly quiet person, even though I know I talk a lot in my videos, and I felt that being Black Bag partly reflects the way people project themselves onto someone who doesn't speak, interpreting that silence in a way that says more about their own personality than about the quiet person himself. I've noticed this in my own life, and I found the range of reactions to Black Bag over the course of the novel, from people who seem worried about him to others who are instantly hostile, a genuinely sharp piece of observation about how we treat quiet presences.
The novel also reads as a real counterpoint to our internet age, where anyone with any kind of online presence is expected to be conspicuous, whether that means constantly performing a personal brand or, at the other extreme, hiding behind total anonymity to troll people without consequence. Black Bag's radical anonymity cuts directly against both of those impulses. The counterweight in the story is his closest friend Claudio, an online gamer with millions of followers who is hyper-visible in exactly the way the narrator isn't, and who has to constantly balance the expectations of his audience against staying authentically himself. I related to that pressure in a much humbler way through my own experience of having a BookTube channel, wanting to respond to feedback without simply fashioning myself for an audience. Being authentically yourself risks becoming a target for criticism, but bending to the most popular demands makes a public persona feel soulless, and Black Bag's total refusal to offer any response, opinion or distinguishing feature raises the question of whether that's a different kind of soullessness, or whether it actually preserves something essential about him.
Despite being opposites professionally, Claudio, the capitalist who has learned to make his online identity profitable, and the narrator, who believes in an art form he can't make profitable, have a fraternal bond I found genuinely moving. Some of the funniest material in the book comes out of their friendship once Claudio starts trying to help monetise Black Bag: the scene where the narrator is paid in actual cash and the two of them are almost bewildered by physical money in an age of tap-to-pay, and his first instinct once he's flush with cash is to buy new curtains, which he then hangs while humming "Master of the House" from Les Misérables. It's such a small, specific, funny detail, and it's typical of how the novel builds character through moments like that.
Justine, and What We Project Onto Each Other
While he's playing Black Bag at the university, the narrator strikes up a relationship with Justine, an older professor there, and it becomes both a sexual and a romantic one, all while he remains inside the bag. It's mutually fulfilling in some ways but was never going to be entirely satisfying, and I became very curious about her motives. Since she doesn't know anything about the actual person behind the bag, what does she really want out of the connection: a genuine exchange, or complete control over someone who must play by her rules? The way their relationship plays out raises real questions about whether we're ever loving the actual person we're with, or simply projecting our own desires onto them, and whether we can ever truly know someone we're in a relationship with.
The Swedish Daydream and the Family He Won't Describe
To survive the lectures he has to sit through as Black Bag, which are themselves reproduced in places in the novel and cover the psychology of our current social atmosphere, the narrator invents an entire alternate life for himself in his head: a simple, humble existence in rural Sweden, complete with a sawmill job, an injury, and a woman named Birgitta who feeds him cake. These daydreams take up more and more space in his emotional life. It's genuinely strange and moving that some of the narrator's most honest emotional moments in the whole book happen inside a fantasy he's constructed and it says something real about how much of our imaginative life can end up carrying more weight than our actual lived experience, which felt like another quiet comment on how we live now, half in reality and half online or in our own heads.
It's a striking contrast to how he treats his own family: when he visits his parents, he refuses to give any real details about them at all, referring to them only as two stone pillars, guarding their privacy even as he's spilling every detail of his invented Swedish village. His imagined exchanges with the family dog, Elliot, who has a very funny personality of his own in these daydreamed conversations, felt like another way of the narrator talking to himself.
Where the Novel Gets Shakier
As the story develops, it edges into something closer to a conspiracy plot, almost a cult story and the narrator’s performance as Black Bag gets tangled up in a vague cryptocurrency scheme. This is where the novel felt slightly shakier to me, striving to do a bit too much. I can see the justification for it, though, since we're only ever inside the narrator's head, and he doesn't fully understand this secret order of people or the financial mechanics behind Claudio’s financial schemes any more than we do; his own information is limited to a slightly ridiculous spying mission. I think these elements of the novel mostly work as a kind of ego-check for him: a way of forcing him to recognise that he isn't special, that he isn't even the original Black Bag, however much he's come to believe otherwise.
His ego does grow across the novel, until he starts to think of himself as the original Black Bag, almost a prophet, which is a real irony given that he has no identity left to speak of. At one point he asks himself, "Isn't it time someone rescued me from the cult of myself for deprogramming?" The ending of the novel presents a real challenge to the narrator’s conception of himself and it leaves open whether affection that arrives purely through exposure is worth having at all.
Form and Style
On a practical level, the novel is built from very short, punchy chapters, rarely more than four or five pages, which keeps the whole thing moving at a brisk, pleasurable pace even when the narrator gets lost in his own ruminations about the death of serious theatre or his romantic failures. It's a world away from the density of something like "The Melancholy of Resistance," which my book club read together earlier this year. Kennard also doesn't use quotation marks for dialogue, and readers in my group responded to that differently, from finding it pretentious to barely noticing it anymore given how common it's become in recent literary fiction. There's even a case to be made that stripping the marks which usually identify speech mirrors what the novel does to its narrator, removing every marker that identifies him, though it didn't add much extra meaning for me personally; I don't think the novel would have lost anything by including them.
I read the book first in print and then went back through the audiobook, which Kennard narrates himself. A number of people in my book club who'd listened to the audio first told me it really adds to the experience, and I found that to be true: his own performance of the material brings out a layered quality in the reading. Rereading it that way, already knowing the plot, let me sit with the larger questions in more detail. This year's Booker chair, Mary Beard, has said her bar for a book is whether it's worth reading more than once, and I think "Black Bag" clears that easily.
Verdict
I found "Black Bag" an extremely enjoyable, genuinely clever read, funny and strange in equal measure, with far more going on beneath its absurd premise than it might first suggest. It raised so many questions for me about visibility and privilege, about how much of ourselves we perform online versus withhold, and about what we're really responding to when we love someone, whether that's another person, an anonymous man in a bag, or a life we've only ever imagined. I'd happily read this one again, and I'm curious now to seek out Kennard's other novels and his poetry.
Read more of my reviews on my book blog LonesomeReader or check out the videos on my BookTube channel or consider joining my Bookclub
I just read "Black Bag" with my online book club, and it was such a pleasurable experience, both because the novel is genuinely fun and because it kept provoking deeper questions the whole way through, if you want to engage with it on that level. I also had the pleasure of interviewing Luke Kennard and we had a fun lengthy discussion about a wide range of subjects which you can watch here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIdBHDdJmN8
The novel has a wonderfully straightforward, almost absurd premise: an unnamed, down-on-his-luck actor takes a job in a university classroom for a psychological experiment, wearing a black bag that covers his entire body, unable to speak or interact with anyone. He's just a strange, silent presence in the room, and the experiment is designed to study the effects of that. We get his first-person account of it all, written as though it's unfolding in real time.
The premise is based on an actual experiment. In 1967, Charles Goetzinger at Oregon State University seated a figure in a black bag in his class to demonstrate the "mere-exposure effect," the idea that repeated proximity breeds affection, and watched his students move from hostility to curiosity to friendship over the course of a term. Kennard has said he came across it as a footnote in a social psychology article, and that he was more interested in the actor who took the job than in the finding itself. The real study recorded the students' reactions and left no account of the man inside the bag. Kennard gives us only the inside, updated for the present day and relocated to England.
A Man Who Wants Theatre on His Own Terms
I found the narrator endearing: his passionate love of theatre, his sensitive, arty English foppishness, and his pretensions and wry observations about the state of the current world. I pictured him as a young Hugh Grant. He considers theatre the highest art form and finds it genuinely bewildering that the rest of the world doesn't share his devotion to it, yet he can barely get work as an actor and has to default to dinner theatre and cheap detective-mystery performances just to pay the bills. There's a real contradiction in him that the novel is quietly aware of: he holds theatre up as the highest art and wants everyone to be as enthusiastic about it as he is, but when he does get more serious, socially engaged roles, he's just as critical of those as pretentious. He seems to want theatre to exist only on his own terms, which of course it can't, and that contradiction makes it entirely believable that once he takes on the role of Black Bag, he lets it feed his ego and become something much bigger than the psychological experiment it's meant to be.
So taking the job as Black Bag, with its steady salary, is a real relief for him financially, but it comes to mean far more than that. The day-to-day unfolding of it is consistently amusing: I could vividly picture the farcical sight of a man stumbling around in a black bag and the whole range of ways people react to him. But because we're experiencing it from his perspective inside the bag, I could also feel how physically uncomfortable, gross and restrictive it becomes, and how nerve-wracking it must be to be so conspicuous while being completely unable to respond to anyone. I love his observation that inside the bag it starts to feel as though his face and skin have become his internal organs. And against that discomfort, there's his growing psychological sense of freedom that comes from being completely anonymous.
Visibility, Anonymity, and the Internet Age
There's something pointed in the fact that the experiment anonymises the one figure least accustomed to it: a relatively handsome white Englishman in his mid-to-late thirties, exactly the type usually granted the centre of the room and the benefit of the doubt by default. Stripping that away becomes a kind of test of what happens when his usual privilege is removed, and how that changes both his sense of self and the way society interacts with him.
It also felt more personal to me than that. I'm naturally a fairly quiet person, even though I know I talk a lot in my videos, and I felt that being Black Bag partly reflects the way people project themselves onto someone who doesn't speak, interpreting that silence in a way that says more about their own personality than about the quiet person himself. I've noticed this in my own life, and I found the range of reactions to Black Bag over the course of the novel, from people who seem worried about him to others who are instantly hostile, a genuinely sharp piece of observation about how we treat quiet presences.
The novel also reads as a real counterpoint to our internet age, where anyone with any kind of online presence is expected to be conspicuous, whether that means constantly performing a personal brand or, at the other extreme, hiding behind total anonymity to troll people without consequence. Black Bag's radical anonymity cuts directly against both of those impulses. The counterweight in the story is his closest friend Claudio, an online gamer with millions of followers who is hyper-visible in exactly the way the narrator isn't, and who has to constantly balance the expectations of his audience against staying authentically himself. I related to that pressure in a much humbler way through my own experience of having a BookTube channel, wanting to respond to feedback without simply fashioning myself for an audience. Being authentically yourself risks becoming a target for criticism, but bending to the most popular demands makes a public persona feel soulless, and Black Bag's total refusal to offer any response, opinion or distinguishing feature raises the question of whether that's a different kind of soullessness, or whether it actually preserves something essential about him.
Despite being opposites professionally, Claudio, the capitalist who has learned to make his online identity profitable, and the narrator, who believes in an art form he can't make profitable, have a fraternal bond I found genuinely moving. Some of the funniest material in the book comes out of their friendship once Claudio starts trying to help monetise Black Bag: the scene where the narrator is paid in actual cash and the two of them are almost bewildered by physical money in an age of tap-to-pay, and his first instinct once he's flush with cash is to buy new curtains, which he then hangs while humming "Master of the House" from Les Misérables. It's such a small, specific, funny detail, and it's typical of how the novel builds character through moments like that.
Justine, and What We Project Onto Each Other
While he's playing Black Bag at the university, the narrator strikes up a relationship with Justine, an older professor there, and it becomes both a sexual and a romantic one, all while he remains inside the bag. It's mutually fulfilling in some ways but was never going to be entirely satisfying, and I became very curious about her motives. Since she doesn't know anything about the actual person behind the bag, what does she really want out of the connection: a genuine exchange, or complete control over someone who must play by her rules? The way their relationship plays out raises real questions about whether we're ever loving the actual person we're with, or simply projecting our own desires onto them, and whether we can ever truly know someone we're in a relationship with.
The Swedish Daydream and the Family He Won't Describe
To survive the lectures he has to sit through as Black Bag, which are themselves reproduced in places in the novel and cover the psychology of our current social atmosphere, the narrator invents an entire alternate life for himself in his head: a simple, humble existence in rural Sweden, complete with a sawmill job, an injury, and a woman named Birgitta who feeds him cake. These daydreams take up more and more space in his emotional life. It's genuinely strange and moving that some of the narrator's most honest emotional moments in the whole book happen inside a fantasy he's constructed and it says something real about how much of our imaginative life can end up carrying more weight than our actual lived experience, which felt like another quiet comment on how we live now, half in reality and half online or in our own heads.
It's a striking contrast to how he treats his own family: when he visits his parents, he refuses to give any real details about them at all, referring to them only as two stone pillars, guarding their privacy even as he's spilling every detail of his invented Swedish village. His imagined exchanges with the family dog, Elliot, who has a very funny personality of his own in these daydreamed conversations, felt like another way of the narrator talking to himself.
Where the Novel Gets Shakier
As the story develops, it edges into something closer to a conspiracy plot, almost a cult story and the narrator’s performance as Black Bag gets tangled up in a vague cryptocurrency scheme. This is where the novel felt slightly shakier to me, striving to do a bit too much. I can see the justification for it, though, since we're only ever inside the narrator's head, and he doesn't fully understand this secret order of people or the financial mechanics behind Claudio’s financial schemes any more than we do; his own information is limited to a slightly ridiculous spying mission. I think these elements of the novel mostly work as a kind of ego-check for him: a way of forcing him to recognise that he isn't special, that he isn't even the original Black Bag, however much he's come to believe otherwise.
His ego does grow across the novel, until he starts to think of himself as the original Black Bag, almost a prophet, which is a real irony given that he has no identity left to speak of. At one point he asks himself, "Isn't it time someone rescued me from the cult of myself for deprogramming?" The ending of the novel presents a real challenge to the narrator’s conception of himself and it leaves open whether affection that arrives purely through exposure is worth having at all.
Form and Style
On a practical level, the novel is built from very short, punchy chapters, rarely more than four or five pages, which keeps the whole thing moving at a brisk, pleasurable pace even when the narrator gets lost in his own ruminations about the death of serious theatre or his romantic failures. It's a world away from the density of something like "The Melancholy of Resistance," which my book club read together earlier this year. Kennard also doesn't use quotation marks for dialogue, and readers in my group responded to that differently, from finding it pretentious to barely noticing it anymore given how common it's become in recent literary fiction. There's even a case to be made that stripping the marks which usually identify speech mirrors what the novel does to its narrator, removing every marker that identifies him, though it didn't add much extra meaning for me personally; I don't think the novel would have lost anything by including them.
I read the book first in print and then went back through the audiobook, which Kennard narrates himself. A number of people in my book club who'd listened to the audio first told me it really adds to the experience, and I found that to be true: his own performance of the material brings out a layered quality in the reading. Rereading it that way, already knowing the plot, let me sit with the larger questions in more detail. This year's Booker chair, Mary Beard, has said her bar for a book is whether it's worth reading more than once, and I think "Black Bag" clears that easily.
Verdict
I found "Black Bag" an extremely enjoyable, genuinely clever read, funny and strange in equal measure, with far more going on beneath its absurd premise than it might first suggest. It raised so many questions for me about visibility and privilege, about how much of ourselves we perform online versus withhold, and about what we're really responding to when we love someone, whether that's another person, an anonymous man in a bag, or a life we've only ever imagined. I'd happily read this one again, and I'm curious now to seek out Kennard's other novels and his poetry.
Read more of my reviews on my book blog LonesomeReader or check out the videos on my BookTube channel or consider joining my Bookclub
August 8, 2026
Booker Longlist #5
4.5, rounded up.
This was just up my alley - bonkers, funny, but with an underlying sadness, and some insightful, but not heavy-handed, things to say about how we live now. What kept it from being a full 5 stars were some meandering scenes towards the end, and a bit too many meta congratulatory thoughts on its own cleverness.
At times, I caught whiffs of such disparate authors as A R Moxon, Mark Z. Danielewski, David Nicholls Tom Robbins and Kurt Vonnegut Jr. - while remaining utterly unique. It's certainly worthy of being on this year's Booker longlist - hoping it makes the shortlist, but doubt it can win.
4.5, rounded up.
This was just up my alley - bonkers, funny, but with an underlying sadness, and some insightful, but not heavy-handed, things to say about how we live now. What kept it from being a full 5 stars were some meandering scenes towards the end, and a bit too many meta congratulatory thoughts on its own cleverness.
At times, I caught whiffs of such disparate authors as A R Moxon, Mark Z. Danielewski, David Nicholls Tom Robbins and Kurt Vonnegut Jr. - while remaining utterly unique. It's certainly worthy of being on this year's Booker longlist - hoping it makes the shortlist, but doubt it can win.
December 26, 2025
oh god, I just adored this. I’d read a thousand more pages about Black Bag, then turn back to the beginning and read them all again.
EDIT: and it’s a Booker longlistee!! not to say I’m a tastemaker, but…
EDIT: and it’s a Booker longlistee!! not to say I’m a tastemaker, but…
Read
August 24, 2026The first half of this book was definitely stronger than the second. I found myself genuinely laughing out loud at certain scenes near the start; not only the absurdity of what is happening but how Kennard writes it. There's a lot to unpack in this book: masculinity, capitalism, psychology, romance/attraction. And individually, each element and its corresponding storyline was truly interesting and enjoyable to read. However, I don't know that it ALL came together in a satisfying, cohesive narrative that, in the end, packed a punch. Something about it felt a bit messy, but still loveable and truly entertaining, allowing me to forgive the mistakes for something original and refreshing FUN from the Booker longlist.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
3.5/4
Black Bag is a bizarre but compelling novel that follows an unnamed out of work actor who gets a job where he is required to sit in lectures from inside a black bag. Dr Blend, who employs the actor, insists he remain silent and not move; he must not speak to the students and preferably arrive and leave as black bag.
As the experiment continues the actor becomes more comfortable remaining as black bag outside of the classroom and the results of his non-interactions with others begins to bring about surprising results.
Perhaps to appreciate the weird nature of the book it should be noted that the original black bag experiment was first conducted by Charles Goetzinger in 1967 at Oregon State University.
In the original experiment it was the students reactions that were observed but Luke Kennard has flipped this on its head by being solely interested in the person inside the bag.
Black Bag is strange, surprising, funny in parts, most definitely not like anything I've read before and it makes me want to read more of his work.
Thankyou to Netgalley and Zando for the digital review copy.
Black Bag is a bizarre but compelling novel that follows an unnamed out of work actor who gets a job where he is required to sit in lectures from inside a black bag. Dr Blend, who employs the actor, insists he remain silent and not move; he must not speak to the students and preferably arrive and leave as black bag.
As the experiment continues the actor becomes more comfortable remaining as black bag outside of the classroom and the results of his non-interactions with others begins to bring about surprising results.
Perhaps to appreciate the weird nature of the book it should be noted that the original black bag experiment was first conducted by Charles Goetzinger in 1967 at Oregon State University.
In the original experiment it was the students reactions that were observed but Luke Kennard has flipped this on its head by being solely interested in the person inside the bag.
Black Bag is strange, surprising, funny in parts, most definitely not like anything I've read before and it makes me want to read more of his work.
Thankyou to Netgalley and Zando for the digital review copy.
August 3, 2026
Longlisted for the 2026 Booker Prize
Male actor required for psychological enquiry. Non- speaking, but discretion and devotion to restrictive performance requirements obligatory. Duration 3– 4 months, start asap, pref immediate. No experience in discipline (Psychology) necessary. Short / slight stature preferred certainly no more than 5’8 but shorter if possible (Legs). Fee to be discussed. Contact Dr Paul Blend &c.
Luke Kennard's latest book is, in two different senses, a baggy novel. Our first person narrator introduces himself with:
If you met anyone as whiny, as disobliging and egocentric as the average narrator of a novel in real life you’d find them unbearable. You’d give them about five minutes before you excused yourself to get another drink, or moved to a different carriage, or asked to be transferred to an alternative department so you didn’t have to work with them any more. I’m not like that.
He is in fact an actor - although one lacking in much work other than corporate dinner murder-mystery gigs, leading him to apply for a series of unusual jobs including the advert above.
Dr Paul Blend proves to be a university lecturer in psychology and he wants our narrator to help him recreate the black bag experiment from 1967 when a student attended a term of lectures wearing a black bag that completely covered his body other than his bare feat, as the author explains in both an Observer article and the afterword:
The original black bag experiment was conducted by Charles Goetzinger in 1967 at Oregon State University in order to test Robert Zajonc’s mere-exposure effect. He observed that, over the course of the semester, ‘the students’ attitude changed from hostility toward the Black Bag to curiosity and finally to friendship’ (Goetzinger, quoted in Zajonc’s paper, ‘Attitudinal Effects of Mere Exposure’). In happening across this while researching a poem, I was immediately (which is to say obsessively and exclusively) concerned with Black Bag himself.
Although from my own research into the original sources (summarised here), I'm not convinced this was a deliberate experiment by Goetzinger, rather the idea was the student's who wore the black bag.
The inspiration was actually Yoko Ono and her then husband Anthony Cox and a performance they put on - here in London in 1966
The satirical columnist Art Hoppe from the San Francisco Chronicle in California wrote a column in early 1967 where he presented "the man of the Year Award to the individual who did the most during 1966 to make the world a better place to live" to Anthony Cox, who he credited with starting the Black Bag Movement which professes that "the world would be better off if everyone wore large, black, cloth bags."
And the student took his inspiration from that article which was syndicated in the US press including the The Oregon State Barometer on 5th Jan 1967, and who took to wearing a black bag to lectures, with Goetzinger's permission (and with only Goetzinger knowing his identity). The idea was more around eliminating prejudice and reducing sensory overload than testing Robert Zajonc’s ideas.
Later the reaction of the students to the black bag was picked up by Robert Zajonc as illustrating mere exposure, but it doesn't seem to have been the motivation.
See below for a February 1967 article.
But (reluctantly) back to the novel.
Our narrator finds he is required to simply sit, or initially lie, in lectures, for a total of two hours a week, wearing his all encompassing bag, and interacting with the students as little as possible:
I am in black bag, and I'm lying on a desk at the back of the lecture theater. From the feel of it, I imagine it to be a desk with metal legs, painted a glossy gray, and the surface to be a pine-colored fake wood veneer. But why shouldn't I imagine the room to be far nicer than it may, in fact, be?
And while in the lectures while he listens to Dr Brand, he gradually drifts off, into what he terms 'maladaptive daydreaming', creating an elaborate fantasy of his life in an isolated Swedish town, initially prompted by Blend referring to the Örebro 10-to-18 Study into distance dependence of adolescent friendships).
Dr Blend shows us several slides of decorated bones, some encrusted with jewels, some converted into rudimentary weapons. He says something about Spinoza and ‘the sad passions’. Whenever our power to act is diminished. Fear, hate, envy, shame. He likens this to jouissance in Lacan. Birgitta has always wanted to visit her bedbound sister in the next town. I would like to make this possible but have no means of transport. I have been keeping savings from my salary at the sawmill, dull little silver coins decorated with stags, in a tin can in my locker to pay for her train fare. Mine too, so as to chaperone her. But when I leave work I notice that someone has stolen my can.
Kennard in the Observer comments: “In my novel, the narrator suffers from a form of maladaptive daydreaming; whenever he sits in his bag in the lecture theatre, he cannot help but come up with characters and histories for every case study participant he hears about from the professor” - although actually after the first daydream he keeps returning to his fantasy of Birgitta.
Our narrator starts to inhabit the role of black bag, rather than simply spending two hours performing it, and, inter alia, ends up getting sucked, via his best friend, into a crypto-scheme; has a sexual-relationship, while wearing his bag, with another lecturer; encounters a black-bags anonymous society; and has heated conversations with his parent's dogs while depicting them as mute statues.
And this is the problem with the novel - the second baggy element. It's 389 pages long and Kennard keeps throwing in more ideas. The novel covers / satirises, amongst other topics:
- the crisis in masculinity (although that doesn’t seem to have been particularly intended)
- behavioural psychology and its adoption by the marketing industry to manipulate consumers
- university campus architecture (and very disappointingly treats bricolage as a bad thing)
- Twitch streamers
- NFTs
- energy drinks
- managerialism in academia
- sexual politics on campus (and the inversion of the troubled male lecturer-female student affair)
- relationships with parents
- readers' demands for likeable characters
- tech bros and AI
- the demands of lecturing on academics
- artistic identity and the demand for publicity rather than anonymity
and more. And it's just too much - the humour and zest of the first third of the novel starts to wear thin by the end and whole story lines (the female professor in particular) seem unnecessary.
Although its most important message is on the redemptive power of art - and while ultimately, for me, unsuccessful, a novel I'm pleased to see the Booker judges embrace.
To trust in the arts is an act of hubris so self-destructive the gods don’t even bother to punish you for it. It is to become a monstrous politician of an insecure republic, an estate agent of your own soul, a demon of lubricity. There is just a chance, though, the width of a crack in a martini glass, that we need it more than ever.
February 1967 article
Desert Sun, Volume 40, Number 178, 28 February 1967
Student in Black Bag Talks, Loses Mystery
CORVALLIS, Ore. (UPI) - The bare-footed black bag of Speech 113 finally has been accepted at Oregon State University, although he hasn’t contributed much from an oratorical standpoint.
He shows up three times a week, covered from head to ankles with a black cloth sack, and sits Indian fashion in silence on a table, desk, or the floor.
The mysterious student, who moves about with only his bare feet showing, is up to something but nobody seems to know just what. He told newsmen in a brief interview that to reveal his goals would interfer with the results. He said people tend to judge others by their clothes, skin color, features and expressions so he wondered what their judgments would be when these factors were absent.
The man in the black bag arrives and leaves the campus in a car driven by a friend. He said he attends other classes without wearing the bag. But in the speech class of 20 students, his identity is known only to Dr. Charles Goetzinger, professor of the speech class in basic persuasion.
Goetzinger says the strange visitor is not a “plant” or part of a class experiment. The professor explained that a student asked him at the opening of winter term if he could dress in a bag and, “I
was nut enough” to allow it.
The silent student in conservative black got a rough reception at first. Most students tried to ignore him, some were hostile, and one jabbed him with an umbrella.
However, it was impossible to ignore him, and Dr. Goetzinger said students gradually began to accept the “black bag” and even developed a feeling of sympathy. One student admitted becoming angry when another teacher disparaged the mysterious scholar.
“It made me mad,” the student said. “I felt I had to protect him.”
The man of mystery may have shattered some of his purpose when he broke his long silence. For his first assigned three-minute speech in front of the class, he merely stood there. But one day he spoke in generalities about his motives, and the students were disappointed.
“He blew my image of what a mystery should be,” one said. “The challenge was gone.”
But a girl student, in a letter to a newspaper, pretty well summed up the feelings of most of the students in the speech class: “The Bag has motivated us, made us delve, explore, ponder and try to understand what goes on inside us...Above all It has made us leam. It has persuaded us, and drastically changed everyone in the class.”
The judges' commendation
‘How does an aspiring actor survive in contemporary London, where monthly living costs can rise well over a thousand pounds? The obvious solution – be born rich – has eluded Black Bag’s protagonist, a 37-year-old man who cobbles together an artistically and financially unsatisfying life performing in productions that stretch and undermine the meaning of theatre. That is until he gets a job showing up to student psychology lectures dressed in a black bag. Luke Kennard’s of-the-moment satire considers anonymity and disgust, the online rackets of cryptocurrency and energy drinks, and what it means to find love in our unstable times. There’ll be a lot of discussion about what the novel has to say about the state of modern masculinity (fractious; confused) – we also admired its sharply crafted sentences, memorable sex scenes, and humour.’
Male actor required for psychological enquiry. Non- speaking, but discretion and devotion to restrictive performance requirements obligatory. Duration 3– 4 months, start asap, pref immediate. No experience in discipline (Psychology) necessary. Short / slight stature preferred certainly no more than 5’8 but shorter if possible (Legs). Fee to be discussed. Contact Dr Paul Blend &c.
Luke Kennard's latest book is, in two different senses, a baggy novel. Our first person narrator introduces himself with:
If you met anyone as whiny, as disobliging and egocentric as the average narrator of a novel in real life you’d find them unbearable. You’d give them about five minutes before you excused yourself to get another drink, or moved to a different carriage, or asked to be transferred to an alternative department so you didn’t have to work with them any more. I’m not like that.
He is in fact an actor - although one lacking in much work other than corporate dinner murder-mystery gigs, leading him to apply for a series of unusual jobs including the advert above.
Dr Paul Blend proves to be a university lecturer in psychology and he wants our narrator to help him recreate the black bag experiment from 1967 when a student attended a term of lectures wearing a black bag that completely covered his body other than his bare feat, as the author explains in both an Observer article and the afterword:
The original black bag experiment was conducted by Charles Goetzinger in 1967 at Oregon State University in order to test Robert Zajonc’s mere-exposure effect. He observed that, over the course of the semester, ‘the students’ attitude changed from hostility toward the Black Bag to curiosity and finally to friendship’ (Goetzinger, quoted in Zajonc’s paper, ‘Attitudinal Effects of Mere Exposure’). In happening across this while researching a poem, I was immediately (which is to say obsessively and exclusively) concerned with Black Bag himself.
Although from my own research into the original sources (summarised here), I'm not convinced this was a deliberate experiment by Goetzinger, rather the idea was the student's who wore the black bag.
The inspiration was actually Yoko Ono and her then husband Anthony Cox and a performance they put on - here in London in 1966
The satirical columnist Art Hoppe from the San Francisco Chronicle in California wrote a column in early 1967 where he presented "the man of the Year Award to the individual who did the most during 1966 to make the world a better place to live" to Anthony Cox, who he credited with starting the Black Bag Movement which professes that "the world would be better off if everyone wore large, black, cloth bags."
And the student took his inspiration from that article which was syndicated in the US press including the The Oregon State Barometer on 5th Jan 1967, and who took to wearing a black bag to lectures, with Goetzinger's permission (and with only Goetzinger knowing his identity). The idea was more around eliminating prejudice and reducing sensory overload than testing Robert Zajonc’s ideas.
Later the reaction of the students to the black bag was picked up by Robert Zajonc as illustrating mere exposure, but it doesn't seem to have been the motivation.
See below for a February 1967 article.
But (reluctantly) back to the novel.
Our narrator finds he is required to simply sit, or initially lie, in lectures, for a total of two hours a week, wearing his all encompassing bag, and interacting with the students as little as possible:
I am in black bag, and I'm lying on a desk at the back of the lecture theater. From the feel of it, I imagine it to be a desk with metal legs, painted a glossy gray, and the surface to be a pine-colored fake wood veneer. But why shouldn't I imagine the room to be far nicer than it may, in fact, be?
And while in the lectures while he listens to Dr Brand, he gradually drifts off, into what he terms 'maladaptive daydreaming', creating an elaborate fantasy of his life in an isolated Swedish town, initially prompted by Blend referring to the Örebro 10-to-18 Study into distance dependence of adolescent friendships).
Dr Blend shows us several slides of decorated bones, some encrusted with jewels, some converted into rudimentary weapons. He says something about Spinoza and ‘the sad passions’. Whenever our power to act is diminished. Fear, hate, envy, shame. He likens this to jouissance in Lacan. Birgitta has always wanted to visit her bedbound sister in the next town. I would like to make this possible but have no means of transport. I have been keeping savings from my salary at the sawmill, dull little silver coins decorated with stags, in a tin can in my locker to pay for her train fare. Mine too, so as to chaperone her. But when I leave work I notice that someone has stolen my can.
Kennard in the Observer comments: “In my novel, the narrator suffers from a form of maladaptive daydreaming; whenever he sits in his bag in the lecture theatre, he cannot help but come up with characters and histories for every case study participant he hears about from the professor” - although actually after the first daydream he keeps returning to his fantasy of Birgitta.
Our narrator starts to inhabit the role of black bag, rather than simply spending two hours performing it, and, inter alia, ends up getting sucked, via his best friend, into a crypto-scheme; has a sexual-relationship, while wearing his bag, with another lecturer; encounters a black-bags anonymous society; and has heated conversations with his parent's dogs while depicting them as mute statues.
And this is the problem with the novel - the second baggy element. It's 389 pages long and Kennard keeps throwing in more ideas. The novel covers / satirises, amongst other topics:
- the crisis in masculinity (although that doesn’t seem to have been particularly intended)
- behavioural psychology and its adoption by the marketing industry to manipulate consumers
- university campus architecture (and very disappointingly treats bricolage as a bad thing)
- Twitch streamers
- NFTs
- energy drinks
- managerialism in academia
- sexual politics on campus (and the inversion of the troubled male lecturer-female student affair)
- relationships with parents
- readers' demands for likeable characters
- tech bros and AI
- the demands of lecturing on academics
- artistic identity and the demand for publicity rather than anonymity
and more. And it's just too much - the humour and zest of the first third of the novel starts to wear thin by the end and whole story lines (the female professor in particular) seem unnecessary.
Although its most important message is on the redemptive power of art - and while ultimately, for me, unsuccessful, a novel I'm pleased to see the Booker judges embrace.
To trust in the arts is an act of hubris so self-destructive the gods don’t even bother to punish you for it. It is to become a monstrous politician of an insecure republic, an estate agent of your own soul, a demon of lubricity. There is just a chance, though, the width of a crack in a martini glass, that we need it more than ever.
February 1967 article
Desert Sun, Volume 40, Number 178, 28 February 1967
Student in Black Bag Talks, Loses Mystery
CORVALLIS, Ore. (UPI) - The bare-footed black bag of Speech 113 finally has been accepted at Oregon State University, although he hasn’t contributed much from an oratorical standpoint.
He shows up three times a week, covered from head to ankles with a black cloth sack, and sits Indian fashion in silence on a table, desk, or the floor.
The mysterious student, who moves about with only his bare feet showing, is up to something but nobody seems to know just what. He told newsmen in a brief interview that to reveal his goals would interfer with the results. He said people tend to judge others by their clothes, skin color, features and expressions so he wondered what their judgments would be when these factors were absent.
The man in the black bag arrives and leaves the campus in a car driven by a friend. He said he attends other classes without wearing the bag. But in the speech class of 20 students, his identity is known only to Dr. Charles Goetzinger, professor of the speech class in basic persuasion.
Goetzinger says the strange visitor is not a “plant” or part of a class experiment. The professor explained that a student asked him at the opening of winter term if he could dress in a bag and, “I
was nut enough” to allow it.
The silent student in conservative black got a rough reception at first. Most students tried to ignore him, some were hostile, and one jabbed him with an umbrella.
However, it was impossible to ignore him, and Dr. Goetzinger said students gradually began to accept the “black bag” and even developed a feeling of sympathy. One student admitted becoming angry when another teacher disparaged the mysterious scholar.
“It made me mad,” the student said. “I felt I had to protect him.”
The man of mystery may have shattered some of his purpose when he broke his long silence. For his first assigned three-minute speech in front of the class, he merely stood there. But one day he spoke in generalities about his motives, and the students were disappointed.
“He blew my image of what a mystery should be,” one said. “The challenge was gone.”
But a girl student, in a letter to a newspaper, pretty well summed up the feelings of most of the students in the speech class: “The Bag has motivated us, made us delve, explore, ponder and try to understand what goes on inside us...Above all It has made us leam. It has persuaded us, and drastically changed everyone in the class.”
The judges' commendation
‘How does an aspiring actor survive in contemporary London, where monthly living costs can rise well over a thousand pounds? The obvious solution – be born rich – has eluded Black Bag’s protagonist, a 37-year-old man who cobbles together an artistically and financially unsatisfying life performing in productions that stretch and undermine the meaning of theatre. That is until he gets a job showing up to student psychology lectures dressed in a black bag. Luke Kennard’s of-the-moment satire considers anonymity and disgust, the online rackets of cryptocurrency and energy drinks, and what it means to find love in our unstable times. There’ll be a lot of discussion about what the novel has to say about the state of modern masculinity (fractious; confused) – we also admired its sharply crafted sentences, memorable sex scenes, and humour.’
August 2, 2026
I'm not entirely sure what Luke Kennard was trying to do with Black Bag. I'm not sure Luke Kennard was entirely sure what Luke Kennard was trying to do with Black Bag. It's one of those voicey novels that becomes increasingly exhausting -- not, in this case, because the voice itself becomes tiring, but because I felt less and less sure that that voice was being used to talk about anything, other than the typical Urban Male Ennui. I'm sorry: we're supposed to call it the "masculinity crisis" now -- a framing I am also increasingly tired of.
That's ultimately what's at the core of this book, but aside from illustrating that men are in crisis and male friends should tell each other they love each other more (...yes?) -- what else is here? Well, there is a long and baffling sequence where two characters -- an English professor and an actor -- go on a date to see a movie "made entirely by AI." This is in the same book in which NFTs are still a thing -- so what year is it? Anyway, neither of these creative professionals seem terribly bothered by the fact of this AI movie. Kennard also grants his version of Gen AI enormous creativity, with a resulting film that sounds more like the Wachowskis in Jupiter Ascending mode than anything AI could come up with. This plot point is then entirely abandoned.
What does Kennard want readers to think about AI? What does he want them to think about sex or art or, indeed, masculinity? Or does he just want to get a bit wacky with it?
If it's that last: I'm sorry, this book isn't funny enough.
It's also fundamentally not a campus novel, as the copy claims (do words not mean anything?). And I kind of can't believe it's a Booker Prize longlistee. But then: who the fuck knows what any of us are doing anymore, really.
That's ultimately what's at the core of this book, but aside from illustrating that men are in crisis and male friends should tell each other they love each other more (...yes?) -- what else is here? Well, there is a long and baffling sequence where two characters -- an English professor and an actor -- go on a date to see a movie "made entirely by AI." This is in the same book in which NFTs are still a thing -- so what year is it? Anyway, neither of these creative professionals seem terribly bothered by the fact of this AI movie. Kennard also grants his version of Gen AI enormous creativity, with a resulting film that sounds more like the Wachowskis in Jupiter Ascending mode than anything AI could come up with. This plot point is then entirely abandoned.
What does Kennard want readers to think about AI? What does he want them to think about sex or art or, indeed, masculinity? Or does he just want to get a bit wacky with it?
If it's that last: I'm sorry, this book isn't funny enough.
It's also fundamentally not a campus novel, as the copy claims (do words not mean anything?). And I kind of can't believe it's a Booker Prize longlistee. But then: who the fuck knows what any of us are doing anymore, really.
November 30, 2025
"The world disappointed them, so they disappointed the world."
There’s no sugarcoating this, so I won’t even try. The cover for this is one of the weirdest I have ever seen. We all know my fondness of weird, that meant that this was a no brainer for me. Weird it was but also disappointing.
I wasn’t sure how the author would take a simple idea and turn it into a full fledged novel, but here we are and the outcome wasn’t as exciting as I had hoped. Now, parts of this were absolutely ridiculous and enjoyable. While others were dull and stretched out. Plus that conclusion bored me. I almost given up on this a few times but there was something about this that kept me going. It was a car wreck and you couldn’t help but look at it.
My favorite character was Justine. She was totally wild and I loved her. You never knew what was going to come out of her mouth, plus she was a straight up freak and didn’t care who knew. She was perfect. I swear, her character was the only standout one.
‘Black Bag’ was an interesting tale but about two hundred pages too long. There were a lot of unnecessary situations happening and it just wasn’t interesting. Everything that took place around campus had me intrigued, other than that I wasn’t impressed. It was worth the read once but definitely not an instant classic.
There’s no sugarcoating this, so I won’t even try. The cover for this is one of the weirdest I have ever seen. We all know my fondness of weird, that meant that this was a no brainer for me. Weird it was but also disappointing.
I wasn’t sure how the author would take a simple idea and turn it into a full fledged novel, but here we are and the outcome wasn’t as exciting as I had hoped. Now, parts of this were absolutely ridiculous and enjoyable. While others were dull and stretched out. Plus that conclusion bored me. I almost given up on this a few times but there was something about this that kept me going. It was a car wreck and you couldn’t help but look at it.
My favorite character was Justine. She was totally wild and I loved her. You never knew what was going to come out of her mouth, plus she was a straight up freak and didn’t care who knew. She was perfect. I swear, her character was the only standout one.
‘Black Bag’ was an interesting tale but about two hundred pages too long. There were a lot of unnecessary situations happening and it just wasn’t interesting. Everything that took place around campus had me intrigued, other than that I wasn’t impressed. It was worth the read once but definitely not an instant classic.
August 5, 2026
What a strange one. This Booker longlist is wild and I’m here for it. Tempted to start this all over again.
A surreal, wacky, darkly comic, and original examination of masculinity and its place in modern society. I never knew where it was heading. I get the feeling I’ll be thinking about this one for a really long time.
A complaint: it’s too long. Could’ve been tighter with 50-100 less pages.
Full review to come
A surreal, wacky, darkly comic, and original examination of masculinity and its place in modern society. I never knew where it was heading. I get the feeling I’ll be thinking about this one for a really long time.
A complaint: it’s too long. Could’ve been tighter with 50-100 less pages.
Full review to come
August 15, 2026
Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2026
An enjoyable, stimulating and often funny book, which I am grateful to the Booker judges for bringing to my attention. Could maybe have been improved by a little judicious editing, though a tight focus on the main story might have been a little oppressive. The starting point of the book is the 1967 Black Bag psychology experiment, in which a student attended a term's lectures and seminars hidden inside a black bag. Kennard's starting point is to transplant this scenario to a present day British university, make the man in the black bag the main protagonist, in this case a struggling actor, and explore the consequences.
An enjoyable, stimulating and often funny book, which I am grateful to the Booker judges for bringing to my attention. Could maybe have been improved by a little judicious editing, though a tight focus on the main story might have been a little oppressive. The starting point of the book is the 1967 Black Bag psychology experiment, in which a student attended a term's lectures and seminars hidden inside a black bag. Kennard's starting point is to transplant this scenario to a present day British university, make the man in the black bag the main protagonist, in this case a struggling actor, and explore the consequences.
August 10, 2026
Booker Longlist Read #4
3.5 stars. I was completely drawn into this unique and very strange book. Unlike many other reviewers, I didn't find it particularly funny, but I did find it interesting and entertaining, and somewhere along the way I developed a real tenderness and affection for the protagonist.
I especially enjoyed his vivid and authentic inner thoughts. They felt honest and at times quite vulnerable, and I found myself becoming genuinely invested in him and his experiences. The writing is strong, and the book certainly gave me plenty to think about.
It also made me appreciate being Gen X. Some of the pressures and expectations facing younger generations, and particularly young men, seem incredibly complicated compared with what I remember experiencing. And this is exactly why I love reading literary fiction: it allows us to step into another person's life, see the world through their eyes and, hopefully, come away with a little more empathy and insight into experiences that are very different from our own.
My only real criticism is the ending. After being so completely drawn into the story, I felt it could have been stronger and more satisfying.
The Story: An out-of-work actor accepts an unusual job as part of a university psychology experiment: sitting silently in a lecture theatre while zipped inside a large black leather bag. What begins as a bizarre experiment soon takes on a life of its own.
3.5 stars. I was completely drawn into this unique and very strange book. Unlike many other reviewers, I didn't find it particularly funny, but I did find it interesting and entertaining, and somewhere along the way I developed a real tenderness and affection for the protagonist.
I especially enjoyed his vivid and authentic inner thoughts. They felt honest and at times quite vulnerable, and I found myself becoming genuinely invested in him and his experiences. The writing is strong, and the book certainly gave me plenty to think about.
It also made me appreciate being Gen X. Some of the pressures and expectations facing younger generations, and particularly young men, seem incredibly complicated compared with what I remember experiencing. And this is exactly why I love reading literary fiction: it allows us to step into another person's life, see the world through their eyes and, hopefully, come away with a little more empathy and insight into experiences that are very different from our own.
My only real criticism is the ending. After being so completely drawn into the story, I felt it could have been stronger and more satisfying.
The Story: An out-of-work actor accepts an unusual job as part of a university psychology experiment: sitting silently in a lecture theatre while zipped inside a large black leather bag. What begins as a bizarre experiment soon takes on a life of its own.
August 16, 2026
Guys men are in crisis and apparently we have to read about it now.
I'm not entirely sure what Luke Kennard is trying to do with Black Bag, which is particularly unfortunate because the novel appears to have three very clear things it wants to do: diagnose a crisis of masculinity, interrogate the cultural implications of generative AI, and turn a bizarre psychological experiment involving a man dressed as a black bag into a metaphor for contemporary identity.
The problem is that I found all three considerably more interesting as ideas than as fiction.
The novel's central concern is masculinity or, more precisely, the particular crisis of masculinity experienced by the contemporary, culturally literate, economically precarious, permanently self-conscious man. Kennard's unnamed actor is unemployed, unsuccessful, sexually uncertain and increasingly unsure what being a man is supposed to entail. His friend Claudio represents one possible response: online communities, monetisation, crypto, performance and a kind of aggressively entrepreneurial masculinity. The narrator represents another: withdrawal, passivity, irony and self-erasure.
Kennard himself has been careful to distinguish this from the increasingly ubiquitous language of a "masculinity crisis." In an interview, he argues that the problem is less masculinity itself than "a horrible, regressive version of masculinity" that is in its death throes. That distinction is important because it is arguably the most sophisticated idea in Black Bag: the novel is not asking what has gone wrong with men, but what happens when traditional masculine structures collapse without being replaced by anything coherent.
And yet I found the novel's treatment of this question increasingly self-defeating.
The narrator is so thoroughly absorbed in his own consciousness that the novel occasionally seems to reproduce the pathology it is attempting to analyse. Everything becomes an occasion for self-narration: sex becomes a question of masculine identity; unemployment becomes an existential crisis; art becomes a referendum on personal worth; friendship becomes another way of negotiating male vulnerability. Even the possibility of escaping the self is converted into another elaborate way of thinking about the self.
This is where the black bag becomes such an important device.
The original 1967 experiment on which the novel is based was designed around the "mere exposure effect": a figure concealed inside a black bag appeared in university classrooms, initially provoking hostility before gradually becoming familiar and even accepted. Kennard has said that what interested him was less the psychological experiment than the person inside the bag, the struggling actor for whom anonymity becomes a role in itself.
As a metaphor, this is excellent.
The bag simultaneously represents: visibility and invisibility, performance and erasure, identity and its absence. An actor whose entire professional existence depends upon being seen discovers a strange freedom in becoming unrecognisable. He is no longer required to perform masculinity, attractiveness, success or even personhood. Other people can project whatever they want onto him because he has become an absence onto which meaning can be imposed.
This is also why the sexual relationship with Justine is interesting. She is attracted precisely to the narrator's absence: the person inside the bag becomes desirable because he has ceased to perform the conventional demands of masculine sexuality. The narrator can be wanted without having to present himself. The novel asks whether identity can exist independently of the sexual and social performances through which we normally recognise one another.
The black bag therefore offers what masculinity cannot: a way of existing without having to continually prove that one exists.
But this is also where I think Kennard's metaphor begins to collapse under the weight of its own cleverness.
The bag is such an immediately legible symbol that the novel never really needs to discover what it means. It already means everything. Masculinity, anonymity, performance, art, alienation, sexuality, commodification, contemporary identity: the bag can absorb all of it.
And so it gradually starts to feel less like a developing metaphor and more like a literary hook.
The distinction matters. A successful central symbol should accumulate meaning through the narrative; here, the black bag sometimes feels as though the narrative is being constructed primarily to generate new meanings for the black bag. The object becomes the answer before the novel has finished asking the question.
This problem becomes even more apparent when the novel turns toward generative AI.
On paper, AI should be a perfect extension of Black Bag's central concerns. If the bag asks what remains of a person when we remove their visible identity, AI asks what remains of art when we remove the artist. Both are fundamentally questions of authorship, performance and absence.
Who is speaking when there is no visible speaker?
Who created something when the creator is technologically obscured?
What makes a performance human?
What happens to the artist when the distinction between person and product begins to disappear?
These are genuinely interesting questions.
But the novel's AI material rarely develops them with the same conceptual seriousness that its premise initially promises. The episode involving the AI-generated film is especially frustrating because it appears to open an entire second novel about artificial creativity, only to abandon the subject almost immediately. Kennard gives the technology extraordinary imaginative capabilities, but the resulting satire feels strangely detached from the questions it ought to provoke.
The issue isn't that the AI is implausibly advanced. Satire is perfectly entitled to exaggerate. The issue is that I couldn't work out what the exaggeration was for.
Is Kennard satirising the belief that AI can replace artists? Is he satirising artists' fear of replacement? Is he interested in the commodification of creativity? Is the point that contemporary technology has made originality itself impossible to define? Or is AI simply another sufficiently contemporary object for the novel's characters to project their anxieties onto?
The novel never quite settles the question.
And this is increasingly my problem with Black Bag as a whole. It is full of interesting ideas that seem to be waiting for the novel to commit to them.
The crisis of masculinity.
The black bag as an instrument of erasure.
AI and the disappearance of the artist.
The relationship between online culture and male alienation.
The monetisation of identity.
But Black Bag repeatedly substitutes proliferation for development. It introduces another idea before the previous one has acquired sufficient weight, then another, and another, until the novel begins to resemble the consciousness of its narrator: perpetually associative, perpetually self-interpreting, perpetually moving sideways.
This perhaps explains why I found the book increasingly exhausting rather than increasingly profound.
Other readers have identified the same structural problem I experienced: the plot is secondary to the novel's thematic concerns, and the characters can sometimes feel like vehicles for Kennard's arguments. I think that is exactly right. The novel is not lacking in things to say. It is lacking in the sense that all of those things need to become one thing.
And that is ultimately why the black bag itself becomes such a revealing failure for me. It begins as the novel's most elegant image: the man who wants to escape the demands of masculine identity discovers that the most liberating way to exist might be not to exist visibly at all. But instead of allowing that paradox to deepen, Kennard keeps adding meanings until the metaphor becomes almost infinitely elastic.
Eventually, the bag can mean anything. And when a symbol can mean anything, it risks meaning very little.
I admire the audacity enormously. The premise is strange, funny and genuinely original; the novel has the courage to build an entire book around an absurd image that could very easily have remained a one-line joke. Kennard also clearly understands something important about contemporary alienation: that we are simultaneously expected to construct ourselves endlessly and exhausted by the necessity of doing so.
I just don't think Black Bag knows when to stop constructing. If it had been shorter by perhaps a hundred pages, I suspect I would have found its ideas considerably more forceful. The masculinity argument would have had less room to become repetitive; the AI material could either have been developed properly or removed; and the black bag might have remained an unsettling, genuinely ambiguous metaphor rather than becoming the novel's all-purpose explanatory device.
So I am left with the peculiar experience of admiring almost everything Black Bag is attempting while remaining unconvinced by what it ultimately accomplishes.
The book asks what happens when a man disappears.
My answer is that I mostly wanted the novel to disappear with him.
Booker Prize 2026 longlist
I'm not entirely sure what Luke Kennard is trying to do with Black Bag, which is particularly unfortunate because the novel appears to have three very clear things it wants to do: diagnose a crisis of masculinity, interrogate the cultural implications of generative AI, and turn a bizarre psychological experiment involving a man dressed as a black bag into a metaphor for contemporary identity.
The problem is that I found all three considerably more interesting as ideas than as fiction.
The novel's central concern is masculinity or, more precisely, the particular crisis of masculinity experienced by the contemporary, culturally literate, economically precarious, permanently self-conscious man. Kennard's unnamed actor is unemployed, unsuccessful, sexually uncertain and increasingly unsure what being a man is supposed to entail. His friend Claudio represents one possible response: online communities, monetisation, crypto, performance and a kind of aggressively entrepreneurial masculinity. The narrator represents another: withdrawal, passivity, irony and self-erasure.
Kennard himself has been careful to distinguish this from the increasingly ubiquitous language of a "masculinity crisis." In an interview, he argues that the problem is less masculinity itself than "a horrible, regressive version of masculinity" that is in its death throes. That distinction is important because it is arguably the most sophisticated idea in Black Bag: the novel is not asking what has gone wrong with men, but what happens when traditional masculine structures collapse without being replaced by anything coherent.
And yet I found the novel's treatment of this question increasingly self-defeating.
The narrator is so thoroughly absorbed in his own consciousness that the novel occasionally seems to reproduce the pathology it is attempting to analyse. Everything becomes an occasion for self-narration: sex becomes a question of masculine identity; unemployment becomes an existential crisis; art becomes a referendum on personal worth; friendship becomes another way of negotiating male vulnerability. Even the possibility of escaping the self is converted into another elaborate way of thinking about the self.
This is where the black bag becomes such an important device.
The original 1967 experiment on which the novel is based was designed around the "mere exposure effect": a figure concealed inside a black bag appeared in university classrooms, initially provoking hostility before gradually becoming familiar and even accepted. Kennard has said that what interested him was less the psychological experiment than the person inside the bag, the struggling actor for whom anonymity becomes a role in itself.
As a metaphor, this is excellent.
The bag simultaneously represents: visibility and invisibility, performance and erasure, identity and its absence. An actor whose entire professional existence depends upon being seen discovers a strange freedom in becoming unrecognisable. He is no longer required to perform masculinity, attractiveness, success or even personhood. Other people can project whatever they want onto him because he has become an absence onto which meaning can be imposed.
This is also why the sexual relationship with Justine is interesting. She is attracted precisely to the narrator's absence: the person inside the bag becomes desirable because he has ceased to perform the conventional demands of masculine sexuality. The narrator can be wanted without having to present himself. The novel asks whether identity can exist independently of the sexual and social performances through which we normally recognise one another.
The black bag therefore offers what masculinity cannot: a way of existing without having to continually prove that one exists.
But this is also where I think Kennard's metaphor begins to collapse under the weight of its own cleverness.
The bag is such an immediately legible symbol that the novel never really needs to discover what it means. It already means everything. Masculinity, anonymity, performance, art, alienation, sexuality, commodification, contemporary identity: the bag can absorb all of it.
And so it gradually starts to feel less like a developing metaphor and more like a literary hook.
The distinction matters. A successful central symbol should accumulate meaning through the narrative; here, the black bag sometimes feels as though the narrative is being constructed primarily to generate new meanings for the black bag. The object becomes the answer before the novel has finished asking the question.
This problem becomes even more apparent when the novel turns toward generative AI.
On paper, AI should be a perfect extension of Black Bag's central concerns. If the bag asks what remains of a person when we remove their visible identity, AI asks what remains of art when we remove the artist. Both are fundamentally questions of authorship, performance and absence.
Who is speaking when there is no visible speaker?
Who created something when the creator is technologically obscured?
What makes a performance human?
What happens to the artist when the distinction between person and product begins to disappear?
These are genuinely interesting questions.
But the novel's AI material rarely develops them with the same conceptual seriousness that its premise initially promises. The episode involving the AI-generated film is especially frustrating because it appears to open an entire second novel about artificial creativity, only to abandon the subject almost immediately. Kennard gives the technology extraordinary imaginative capabilities, but the resulting satire feels strangely detached from the questions it ought to provoke.
The issue isn't that the AI is implausibly advanced. Satire is perfectly entitled to exaggerate. The issue is that I couldn't work out what the exaggeration was for.
Is Kennard satirising the belief that AI can replace artists? Is he satirising artists' fear of replacement? Is he interested in the commodification of creativity? Is the point that contemporary technology has made originality itself impossible to define? Or is AI simply another sufficiently contemporary object for the novel's characters to project their anxieties onto?
The novel never quite settles the question.
And this is increasingly my problem with Black Bag as a whole. It is full of interesting ideas that seem to be waiting for the novel to commit to them.
The crisis of masculinity.
The black bag as an instrument of erasure.
AI and the disappearance of the artist.
The relationship between online culture and male alienation.
The monetisation of identity.
But Black Bag repeatedly substitutes proliferation for development. It introduces another idea before the previous one has acquired sufficient weight, then another, and another, until the novel begins to resemble the consciousness of its narrator: perpetually associative, perpetually self-interpreting, perpetually moving sideways.
This perhaps explains why I found the book increasingly exhausting rather than increasingly profound.
Other readers have identified the same structural problem I experienced: the plot is secondary to the novel's thematic concerns, and the characters can sometimes feel like vehicles for Kennard's arguments. I think that is exactly right. The novel is not lacking in things to say. It is lacking in the sense that all of those things need to become one thing.
And that is ultimately why the black bag itself becomes such a revealing failure for me. It begins as the novel's most elegant image: the man who wants to escape the demands of masculine identity discovers that the most liberating way to exist might be not to exist visibly at all. But instead of allowing that paradox to deepen, Kennard keeps adding meanings until the metaphor becomes almost infinitely elastic.
Eventually, the bag can mean anything. And when a symbol can mean anything, it risks meaning very little.
I admire the audacity enormously. The premise is strange, funny and genuinely original; the novel has the courage to build an entire book around an absurd image that could very easily have remained a one-line joke. Kennard also clearly understands something important about contemporary alienation: that we are simultaneously expected to construct ourselves endlessly and exhausted by the necessity of doing so.
I just don't think Black Bag knows when to stop constructing. If it had been shorter by perhaps a hundred pages, I suspect I would have found its ideas considerably more forceful. The masculinity argument would have had less room to become repetitive; the AI material could either have been developed properly or removed; and the black bag might have remained an unsettling, genuinely ambiguous metaphor rather than becoming the novel's all-purpose explanatory device.
So I am left with the peculiar experience of admiring almost everything Black Bag is attempting while remaining unconvinced by what it ultimately accomplishes.
The book asks what happens when a man disappears.
My answer is that I mostly wanted the novel to disappear with him.
Booker Prize 2026 longlist
August 21, 2026
It takes a lot for a book to make me laugh. Especially a novel. But this one made me laugh. Hard. Until the end, when I cried. There's one particular scene when that had me in stitches. A lot of authors are afraid to push the limits when it comes to discussing sex, but Kennard goes there, and it works.
Was it perfect? No. I felt like it could have been edited a bit better than it was.
But it checked a lot of boxes for me. Would I happily re-read it? Yes Was I moved emotionally? Yes Did it address bigger themes? Yes Did it trust the reader to ascertain the themes? Well, it teetered a bit at the end, but for the most part, yes. A little edgy? Yes.
I felt like this book had the impactful feeling of a short story, and reminded me a bit of George Saunders in that regard . . .one of my favorite authors.
To the top of my Booker rankings it goes. For the moment.
Was it perfect? No. I felt like it could have been edited a bit better than it was.
But it checked a lot of boxes for me. Would I happily re-read it? Yes Was I moved emotionally? Yes Did it address bigger themes? Yes Did it trust the reader to ascertain the themes? Well, it teetered a bit at the end, but for the most part, yes. A little edgy? Yes.
I felt like this book had the impactful feeling of a short story, and reminded me a bit of George Saunders in that regard . . .one of my favorite authors.
To the top of my Booker rankings it goes. For the moment.
July 29, 2026
This is a quirky book with an interesting premise. A desperate actor takes a job offered by a psychology professor. He is required to wear a big black leather bag, sit in the back of the lecture hall, and not speak to anyone. He meets a female professor on campus who uses him for strange sex as part of her “research.” His drug-obsessed friend Claudio, an online influencer and gamer, sees a business opportunity.
The book implicitly asks the reader to do what the students do: fill an opaque object with significance. It works as satire, aimed at aimed at the urge to monetize everything and at male interiority. I laughed a few times, especially at Claudio's scheme. Oh, and there’s a talking dog.
It gives us scene after scene involving the Black Bag, filtered through the unnamed actor's thoughts, as it investigates alienation, loneliness, the role of art, personal identity, and masculinity.
I found it hard to get emotionally invested. The flatness is likely intentional, but intention doesn't make it enjoyable to read. When a book makes the Booker Longlist, I expect something elevated. Here, the most interesting part is the premise.
The book implicitly asks the reader to do what the students do: fill an opaque object with significance. It works as satire, aimed at aimed at the urge to monetize everything and at male interiority. I laughed a few times, especially at Claudio's scheme. Oh, and there’s a talking dog.
It gives us scene after scene involving the Black Bag, filtered through the unnamed actor's thoughts, as it investigates alienation, loneliness, the role of art, personal identity, and masculinity.
I found it hard to get emotionally invested. The flatness is likely intentional, but intention doesn't make it enjoyable to read. When a book makes the Booker Longlist, I expect something elevated. Here, the most interesting part is the premise.
August 25, 2026
When a novel about an unsuccesful actor who applies for a job to attend university classes in a large black bag is longlisted for the Booker my attention is put to volume 10.
Yet, I was afraid that close to 400 pages about a black bag would be way too much. But the book kept on getting better. Rarely have I seen a wit that was maintained and held constant for such a long stretch.
Oh what fun this was! But more than that; it contained lots of quotable insights and wisdom tackling our modern age.
One of my favorite novels so far in 2026.
Yet, I was afraid that close to 400 pages about a black bag would be way too much. But the book kept on getting better. Rarely have I seen a wit that was maintained and held constant for such a long stretch.
Oh what fun this was! But more than that; it contained lots of quotable insights and wisdom tackling our modern age.
One of my favorite novels so far in 2026.
Read
August 2, 2026Strange, fascinating, great prose - I'm going to need to sit with this one for a bit.
August 14, 2026
Maybe 3.5? Moments of brilliance, moments of wtf, a super interesting premise, pacing not quite there.
August 4, 2026
“Sorry, I say. I got carried away by the pathos.”
There’s somehow a mismatch between the novel’s implied premise and its actual priorities. It made me feel like I was held verbally hostage by an extremely self-focused, internet-shaped, endlessly self-narrating mind emptying their browser history into one long-ass conversation. The humour didn’t work for me either, which made the whole black bag feel less like a meaningful object and more like a marketing hook.
It reminded me of The Vivisectors, and I became even less patient with Kennard’s asides. A fairly well-written novel that kept pretending it was about one thing while revealing, page after page, that it was really about another. The ending was exactly what I expected: more explaining, almost preemptively, lest we misunderstand the (mis)used allegory. The actor/narrator is left mid-sentence, because, well… there was more of the same, I guess…
There’s somehow a mismatch between the novel’s implied premise and its actual priorities. It made me feel like I was held verbally hostage by an extremely self-focused, internet-shaped, endlessly self-narrating mind emptying their browser history into one long-ass conversation. The humour didn’t work for me either, which made the whole black bag feel less like a meaningful object and more like a marketing hook.
It reminded me of The Vivisectors, and I became even less patient with Kennard’s asides. A fairly well-written novel that kept pretending it was about one thing while revealing, page after page, that it was really about another. The ending was exactly what I expected: more explaining, almost preemptively, lest we misunderstand the (mis)used allegory. The actor/narrator is left mid-sentence, because, well… there was more of the same, I guess…
March 28, 2026
We are all black bag, and such.
August 31, 2026
Absurd and believable at the same time. Quite entertaining. I especially liked the diversions into murder mystery dinner theater (the Half A Mind To Kill Company), Black Bag's oddball reveries of the Swedish Sawmill, and the ongoing pithy commentary on modern society's quirks and anxieties.
June 15, 2026
400 pages is watering an interesting initial premise right down.
It could have been a good novel at 150 ish.. so much of it feels like filler..
It could have been a good novel at 150 ish.. so much of it feels like filler..
September 12, 2026
Hilarious, and I was really drawn into the story. The writing is quite deadpan but this works well with the strange premise and creates such an interesting and relatable narrator. I’ve seen this described as a campus novel and it sort of is and sort of isn’t - it’s not really anything to do with academia and more to do with the narrator’s lack of identity and masculinity crisis. I didn’t love the character of Justine and found her parts a little waning but the relationship between the narrator and Claudio was so great. Not something I’d really expect to see on the Booker but glad it’s been longlisted.
August 26, 2026
a 4 or a 4.5. i devoured this book in 2 sittings. genuinely one of the most fun and intruiging books i've ever read. when i bought this when it came out i didn't think it would be booker prize nominated but i'm so glad it is. booker prize longlist update: 6 read
September 9, 2026
We have a rather tenuous relationship with attention, with acknowledgement. We crave being seen and play up to it. At the same time, this binds us, binds how we talk, how we walk, how we live. So this Black Bag exploration, which tries to explore this, especially with the added weight of social media attention, is a welcome exploration.
Kennard was able to show the on and off feelings for attention. How we act differently if we are being 'seen', how we change if we are not seen. Is it liberating? Is it stifling? He also explores how others react to those that are hidden. Are they a threat, are they benign, does familiarity make them normal?
Was Kennard successful? I'm left with a rather ambiguous feeling, sort of like the story petered out, and maybe I wanted more. The thing is, I don't know what the more that I want is? Maybe it's still under the black bag, still hidden, and it will maybe remain so.
Kennard was able to show the on and off feelings for attention. How we act differently if we are being 'seen', how we change if we are not seen. Is it liberating? Is it stifling? He also explores how others react to those that are hidden. Are they a threat, are they benign, does familiarity make them normal?
Was Kennard successful? I'm left with a rather ambiguous feeling, sort of like the story petered out, and maybe I wanted more. The thing is, I don't know what the more that I want is? Maybe it's still under the black bag, still hidden, and it will maybe remain so.
August 27, 2026
This book was so brilliant I tabbed the heck out of it.
Our unnamed protagonist, a whiny-yet-affable actor taking jobs he considers beneath him is unusually taken with his job as Black Bag. An eccentric university professor hires him to dress up in an anonymous leather black bag to see how his students will react.
When I discovered the plot, I assumed that it would be a book lampooning academia, and all it's esoteric nonsense. Then I realised that it is based on an actual experiment from the 1960s.
Charles Goetzinger used the experiment to demonstrate the mere-exposure effect, showing that familiarity doesn't so much breed contempt as confer a positive bias.
But our protagonist finds Black Bag a comfort. A retreat from the expectations of masculinity and the existential angst of modern life.
Also an attractive older woman called Justine (also a professor) finds the whole concept sexy and proposes that they start a relationship.
What follows is a delightfully crafted patchwork of zany situations, philosophical reflections, absurd antics, bittersweet musings, and laugh-out-loud moments.
The humour and poignancy grows and grows. Black Bag is a work of genius.
With exceptional satire, this novel commentates on masculinity, millennial ennui, technology, the divisions in our society, the impact of structure and stigma and connection and meaning.
The writing was brilliant. It cracked me up.
Funny books don't tend to win prizes, but I'll be surprised if Black Book isn't at least shortlisted for the Booker.
That's it, I've talked myself into giving it 5 stars!
If you want to find out which passages I loved most and my thoughts in greater detail check out my review on YouTube (RaeLovesToRead).
Our unnamed protagonist, a whiny-yet-affable actor taking jobs he considers beneath him is unusually taken with his job as Black Bag. An eccentric university professor hires him to dress up in an anonymous leather black bag to see how his students will react.
When I discovered the plot, I assumed that it would be a book lampooning academia, and all it's esoteric nonsense. Then I realised that it is based on an actual experiment from the 1960s.
Charles Goetzinger used the experiment to demonstrate the mere-exposure effect, showing that familiarity doesn't so much breed contempt as confer a positive bias.
But our protagonist finds Black Bag a comfort. A retreat from the expectations of masculinity and the existential angst of modern life.
Also an attractive older woman called Justine (also a professor) finds the whole concept sexy and proposes that they start a relationship.
What follows is a delightfully crafted patchwork of zany situations, philosophical reflections, absurd antics, bittersweet musings, and laugh-out-loud moments.
The humour and poignancy grows and grows. Black Bag is a work of genius.
With exceptional satire, this novel commentates on masculinity, millennial ennui, technology, the divisions in our society, the impact of structure and stigma and connection and meaning.
The writing was brilliant. It cracked me up.
Funny books don't tend to win prizes, but I'll be surprised if Black Book isn't at least shortlisted for the Booker.
That's it, I've talked myself into giving it 5 stars!
If you want to find out which passages I loved most and my thoughts in greater detail check out my review on YouTube (RaeLovesToRead).
August 7, 2026
Booker Longlist 3 of 12 (read John and John and the Elizabeth Strout before the list was announced and they were both powerful, if imperfect, novels who plainly made their case for inclusion). Rating: 3 out of 10.
This book was so boring. It was an intriguing premise, a struggling no-longer very young actor gets a gig for a psych prof and begins working as the eponymous black bag (he wears an all encompassing black bag and doesn't speak or interact with others) to the prof's psych classes. Gradually Black Bag takes the narrator over, and he starts enjoying living more and more of life this way. At some point, he realizes that many people have a yearning to be Black Bag. That could be 50 pages, cut, end scene. Quirky, potentially thought provoking, fine.
Instead the book meanders on and on, taking in NFTs, AI creation, extreme psychedelics, sex in the key of fetish and domination, Twitch streamers, the "masculinity crisis" , venture capital and god knows what else. A veritable salad of buzzwords, but nothing is ever actually said.
Also, they billed this as funny. I didn't crack a smile once. Although I did cringe, often.
I hope this is not a harbinger of Booker things to come.
This book was so boring. It was an intriguing premise, a struggling no-longer very young actor gets a gig for a psych prof and begins working as the eponymous black bag (he wears an all encompassing black bag and doesn't speak or interact with others) to the prof's psych classes. Gradually Black Bag takes the narrator over, and he starts enjoying living more and more of life this way. At some point, he realizes that many people have a yearning to be Black Bag. That could be 50 pages, cut, end scene. Quirky, potentially thought provoking, fine.
Instead the book meanders on and on, taking in NFTs, AI creation, extreme psychedelics, sex in the key of fetish and domination, Twitch streamers, the "masculinity crisis" , venture capital and god knows what else. A veritable salad of buzzwords, but nothing is ever actually said.
Also, they billed this as funny. I didn't crack a smile once. Although I did cringe, often.
I hope this is not a harbinger of Booker things to come.
September 2, 2026
The concept and premise of this book were so much fun that I was immediately sold! I liked the quirky style, the character voice, the breaking of the fourth wall - with the narrator directly addressing the reader (I’m a sucker for that stuff) - the relationship between our protagonist and his best friend, Claudio, and the campus setting. I also loved that the book made me think and reflect on topics such as masculinity, identity, the role of art, the values of modern society, and the sense of disorientation experienced by modern men.
All that being said, I had some serious issues with the book. More specifically:
1. While the writing itself is impeccable, at times it felt so intellectual that it crossed the line into pretentiousness. There were moments when I genuinely struggled to follow the author’s train of thought, and it sometimes felt less like storytelling and more like an opportunity to show off just how well-read and knowledgeable he is. And that bothered me. A lot.
2. There was a certain relationship in the book that ultimately went nowhere and felt like it was there simply for the sake of being there. I kept waiting for it to have some greater significance, but it never really did.
3. Something happens during the final 100 pages - if you’ve read the book, you know exactly what I’m talking about, and I won’t spoil it - that leads into a whole bunch of fever-dream-like chapters that, in my opinion, simply didn’t need to be there.
4. While I admire the depth with which certain topics are explored, there were simply too many of them. From the futility of modern man to our perception of others; from sexual identity and the importance of authenticity to capitalism and pretentiousness in academia; from the meaning of the self and the search for purpose to the morality of AI... it was just too much! At some point, it started to feel like the book wanted to have something profound to say about absolutely everything.
5. Finally, an entire chapter is dedicated to a rather taboo subject: the importance society places on having a big penis as a symbol of masculinity. I actually appreciated the willingness to discuss something we rarely talk about so openly, especially the relationship between penis size, masculinity, and male self-worth. However, the book explicitly makes a point of telling us that our protagonist’s dick is perfectly average or rather satisfyingly big - and that made the whole discussion feel somewhat hollow to me. It felt like discussing an insecurity from a position in which the character never actually has to experience it. You can absolutely discuss those issues without personally experiencing them, of course, but when the book positions itself as an exploration of that insecurity while simultaneously reassuring us that its protagonist doesn’t actually have the trait being stigmatized, the whole thing starts to feel strangely disingenuous.
There’s a lot I genuinely admired about this book, and it gave me plenty to think about - which is probably why the things that didn’t work for me frustrated me as much as they did. There is a fascinating novel somewhere in here and I'm really glad I read it; I just wish it had trusted itself enough to explore fewer ideas and do more with them.
3.5 rounded down.
All that being said, I had some serious issues with the book. More specifically:
1. While the writing itself is impeccable, at times it felt so intellectual that it crossed the line into pretentiousness. There were moments when I genuinely struggled to follow the author’s train of thought, and it sometimes felt less like storytelling and more like an opportunity to show off just how well-read and knowledgeable he is. And that bothered me. A lot.
2. There was a certain relationship in the book that ultimately went nowhere and felt like it was there simply for the sake of being there. I kept waiting for it to have some greater significance, but it never really did.
3. Something happens during the final 100 pages - if you’ve read the book, you know exactly what I’m talking about, and I won’t spoil it - that leads into a whole bunch of fever-dream-like chapters that, in my opinion, simply didn’t need to be there.
4. While I admire the depth with which certain topics are explored, there were simply too many of them. From the futility of modern man to our perception of others; from sexual identity and the importance of authenticity to capitalism and pretentiousness in academia; from the meaning of the self and the search for purpose to the morality of AI... it was just too much! At some point, it started to feel like the book wanted to have something profound to say about absolutely everything.
5. Finally, an entire chapter is dedicated to a rather taboo subject: the importance society places on having a big penis as a symbol of masculinity. I actually appreciated the willingness to discuss something we rarely talk about so openly, especially the relationship between penis size, masculinity, and male self-worth. However, the book explicitly makes a point of telling us that our protagonist’s dick is perfectly average or rather satisfyingly big - and that made the whole discussion feel somewhat hollow to me. It felt like discussing an insecurity from a position in which the character never actually has to experience it. You can absolutely discuss those issues without personally experiencing them, of course, but when the book positions itself as an exploration of that insecurity while simultaneously reassuring us that its protagonist doesn’t actually have the trait being stigmatized, the whole thing starts to feel strangely disingenuous.
There’s a lot I genuinely admired about this book, and it gave me plenty to think about - which is probably why the things that didn’t work for me frustrated me as much as they did. There is a fascinating novel somewhere in here and I'm really glad I read it; I just wish it had trusted itself enough to explore fewer ideas and do more with them.
3.5 rounded down.
July 25, 2026
Love love love this. It’s kind of like if Kate Bush wrote Fight Club, if you can imagine that. Very human and heartfelt and full of little truths I wanted to turn over in my brain again and again like hard candy on the tongue. Will probably reread one day and enjoy it twice as much, due to the mere exposure effect.
August 3, 2026
I adored this book. Kennard wastes no time establishing his brand of weird and absurd. This is satire, after all. I loved the playful theological questions, philosophical detours, and commentary on masculinity. And Justine! It felt so refreshing reading her character. She was marvelous.
I do think this could have been about 50 pages shorter, but the plot, philosophical explorations, and the emotional core of the story all intertwined so beautifully by the end that I actually cried a little. It reminded me a lot of my experiences reading the last few pages of a Terry Pratchett novel, where seemingly disparate threads suddenly reveal a deeper truth about humanity.
Ultimately, Black Bag is a story about love, friendship, and finding meaning in an increasingly bewildering world. It feels especially timely and I genuinely think we could all benefit from reading this right now.
Huge thanks to the Booker judges for nominating this delightfully chaotic, thought-provoking, and surprisingly heartwarming novel. If it weren't for The Booker longlist, I doubt I would have picked this up on my own.
I do think this could have been about 50 pages shorter, but the plot, philosophical explorations, and the emotional core of the story all intertwined so beautifully by the end that I actually cried a little. It reminded me a lot of my experiences reading the last few pages of a Terry Pratchett novel, where seemingly disparate threads suddenly reveal a deeper truth about humanity.
Ultimately, Black Bag is a story about love, friendship, and finding meaning in an increasingly bewildering world. It feels especially timely and I genuinely think we could all benefit from reading this right now.
Huge thanks to the Booker judges for nominating this delightfully chaotic, thought-provoking, and surprisingly heartwarming novel. If it weren't for The Booker longlist, I doubt I would have picked this up on my own.
August 29, 2026
3.5 rounding up to 4. I wish he would write a book just about Birgitta and Elliott.
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