The Crossed Keys Chronicle

Black Bag

Cover

My journey through the Booker Prize 2026 longlist has finally taken an enjoyable interlude. I've now completed 6 out of the 13 books on this year's longlist and I've gotten to one that I've really enjoyed. Black Bag by Luke Kennard is a deeply absurdist book about a struggling actor who takes a very unusual job.

We follow an ultimately never named protagonist who is a struggling and mostly out of work actor. He finds a job listing from a psychology professor named Dr Blend at a local university, who offers him the acting opportunity of a lifetime. His role is to be zipped into a large black leather bag with only his legs and feet exposed, and then silently sit in on all of the professor's classes. He's never to speak to the students or to anyone else if he can help it while he's on the job. Dr Blend takes to handing the actor wads of cash during each of their sessions, much to the actor's delight.

After some initial misgivings, the actor comes to relish the job and the persona of Black Bag. He does internal modifications to the Black Bag that involve taping a contactless credit card on the inside so he can buy coffees, and an inner pouch that lets him store reading material. In an effort to stay in character even going to and from the university, the actor starts sleeping over at his friend Claudio's apartment.

As the semester progresses, the actor becomes more and more subsumed into the role, sometimes even sleeping in the bag at home. His friend Claudio also starts a side project using his tech connections to create a crypto-currency based on Black Bag that has the actor going to a yacht party to mingle with prospective investors.

If all of this sounds wacky to you, I haven't even mentioned the other married professor he befriends and has a sexual relationship with, completely while in the bag. Or the fact that during his visits home, he only refers to his parents as stones and while he's there he has long conversations with their dog as he takes it on walks. And that's to say nothing of the climax where we find out our actor is not even the first or only Black Bag.

This is a wild novel, but it also has a lot to say about identity and also how humans can eventually learn to get used to almost anything and even become happy with it. By the end, Dr Blend's class members come to love Black Bag. Many of the longlist books I've read so far this year have had recurring themes of middle-aged men fighting against perceived or real slights against them. This is the first one that eschews that and in fact lets the actor become a literal blank slate for the world to project whatever they want onto it.

One last interesting side note, this experiment did actually take place at Oregon State University back in 1967. The results of the experiment are mirrored in the novel: the students originally were hostile to the assistant but then by the end of the semester they loved them, which is nice to see, since the author didn't have to make up a happy ending in this case.