Reviews
Black Bag is a masterpiece from one of the best writers at work today. In his endlessly quotable prose, Kennard explores modern masculinity with compassion and brutal honesty, warmth and despair - through a narrator who, on every page, discovers his true self and simultaneously buries it. Wildly original and funny, yet always underpinned by depth of feeling, this is a novel like no other
Praise for The Transition:
Extremely smart and extremely funny, a brilliant dismantling of our corporatized century. A book like The Transition is not just a ray of light - it's utterly vital
Disquieting and witty but with such tenderness at its core that it's often heart-stopping. Gorgeous stuff. I devoured it
A tremendous novel - funny, shrewd, poignantly destabilising -- and charged with Luke Kennard's laconic wit and his gimlet eye for the foibles and nuances of human behaviour. A huge success
Equal parts charming and unhinged, Black Bag is the perfect novel for anyone who has ever felt like 'someone is constantly slapping me in the stomach with an old brown shoe.' This is one of hundreds (thousands?) of quotable lines from an immensely talented writer to watch. Luke Kennard, I will follow you anywhere
A stylish, fun, and incisive examination of masculinity, modernity, and attempting to make a living as a creative. It's also a weird little book about and, presumably for, sickos. Reading it hits like a concussion that makes you stranger but more compassionate. Easily the sharpest, funniest thing I've read all year
How much can you fit in a large leather satchel? Luke Kennard suggests, when said bag is zipped up around the body of an out-of-work actor trying to find his way, the answer is near infinite: humor, dear friendship, frustrated desire, a talking dog, a wad of cash, hallucinogens, ambition, AI, humility, and no shortage of heart. Black Bag carried me along with a tremendously deft hand: it had me laughing, unnerved, and hopeful as it galloped through a true and strange world. This book left me reckoning with what to make of the society outside my proverbial eye slits, and what, with some effort, we might make of it still
What's most extraordinary about Black Bag isn't just its wry discursions to the psychology classroom, the sex dungeon, or the Swedish sawmill of the mind - though these are rendered with such phosphorescent wit that I could've read a book's worth of each. In Black Bag, we're treated to an uncommonly funny and deeply necessary snapshot of masculinity no more objectionable nor perfect than a black leather bag. Whoever thinks men aren't writing fiction clearly needs to read Luke Kennard
This book walks and talks like a comedic masterpiece. Part SNL sketch, part Spike Jonze film, Black Bag punks everyone and everything, taking aim at high tech, higher ed, and modern-day masculinity along the way. It's also just plain hot . . . The smart and sexy look this season?
I have been agonising over saying something clever, funny and/or unusual enough to do Black Bag justice. I've failed dismally, which somehow seems in keeping with this brilliant novel. It's enough, perhaps, to note that it made me laugh, think, worry about a man on a swan pedalo and almost shed a tear into the dark leather of my own consciousness.
Had me laughing from page one
Such a smart and philosophical novel really has no business being this entertaining. Black Bag is hilarious, profound, tender and deranged. A deeply cathartic read for anyone seeking the funny side of the total decimation of the arts
Strange and surprisingly tender
With all the fuss about the manosphere, Luke Kennard's Black Bag comes as comic relief . . . The novel is profound as well as funny
[An] ecccentric, amusingly slanted campus novel . . . the action escalates, sometimes into absurdity, always hilariously . . . poignant . . . The bug-eyed hypercapitalism of the internet is gleefully and sinisterly skewered . . . Luke is also a widely admired poet, and his prose ripples with unusual images and wry aphorisms . . The tone throughout is delightfully mordant . . . This is a very modern novel with a comfortingly familiar core: that of an ode to the importance of friendship, tenderness and love
Hilarious . . . Both [of Luke's] works operate as Black Mirror-style satires of late-capitalist, technocratic societies, where discontented thirtysomethings find themselves embroiled in bizarre social experiments. This is all tremendous good fun, with razor-sharp jokes and absurd scenarios galore. It is a campus novel for our end times, packed with keen insights into the current state of art, masculinity and friendship . . . Black Bag fizzes with wit and invention and winningly communicates a very human concern for meaning and connection. In 1967 "Black Bag" apparently took a whole semester to win over his fellow classmates, but this novel will gain your affections on the first page
The absurdist set-up pin-wheels into a comedy of 21st-century manners, told in a winningly wry voice, both vulnerable and dyspeptic
Gleefully absurd . . . a triumph of deadpan comedy . . . From this gloriously unhinged premise, Kennard explores broader questions of identity, masculinity and the pursuit of meaning in art and in life . . . Kennard is superb at capturing [a] chaotic interior life . . . The novel's off-kilter humour combines minute social observation with incongruous ideas, drawing on a wide sphere of reference from religion to pornography. Conceptually, Black Bag is as surreal and ambitious as Tom McCarthy's Remainder, only written by someone with the comic instincts of Peep Show's Jesse Armstrong. But beneath the playfulness lies a thoughtful, tender meditation on the difficulty of being a man in the modern world: how to find purpose, how to make art that matters and how to connect with other people when you suspect you might not possess a fully formed self to offer them. In Kennard's hands, the bag contains a lot, and he's so generous with the jokes that I found myself laughing on almost every page. A brilliant comic tour de force