An out-of-work actor accepts the role of a lifetime—sitting soundlessly in a lecture theater, zipped into a large leather bag—to aid a professor’s psychological experiment. What could possibly go wrong?
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.
