Hilarious ... Tremendous good fun, with razor-sharp jokes and absurd scenarios galore ... A campus novel for our end times, packed with keen insights into the current state of art, masculinity and friendship ... Fizzes with wit and invention and winningly communicates a very human concern for meaning and connection ... This novel will gain your affections on the first page.
A triumph of deadpan comedy ... Kennard is superb at capturing the chaotic interior life that produces such thoughts. The narrator’s mind is an elaborate ecosystem of digressions — riffs on everything from Henry James’s horny characters to the video game Animal Crossing ... Surreal and ambitious ... But beneath the playfulness lies a thoughtful, tender meditation on the difficulty of being a man in the modern world ... A brilliant comic tour de force.
Eccentric, amusingly slanted ... The bug-eyed hypercapitalism of the internet is gleefully and sinisterly skewered ... His prose ripples with unusual images and wry aphorisms ... The tone throughout is delightfully mordant and the novel is as much concerned with writing as anything else ... In the end, this is a very modern novel with a comfortingly familiar core: that of an ode to the importance of friendship, tenderness and love.
Kennard doesn’t hide behind the wacky, playful premise; his characters – an eccentric cast that includes a professor of posthumanism and a flatmate eager to monetize his friend’s new role – are fully realized, contradictory figures who move fluidly between shrewdness and compassion. Resisting any neat resolution, Black Bag becomes a strange, tender meditation on masculinity, academia and the precarities of creative life.
Delightful and dark ... Kennard entertainingly pokes and prods at conceptions of identity, whether in sexual relationships or online personae ... It's a hoot.
