SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
The narrator of Luke Kennard's new novel is never named. He just declares, I'm an actor. I'm mostly unemployed and painfully poor - until the university professor, Dr. Blend offers him a role, the starring role, in fact, in an experiment - zip himself into a black leather bag and sit in the back of his class.
LUKE KENNARD: (Reading) 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?
SIMON: His new novel, "Black Bag." And Luke Kennard joins us now from our studios in London. Thanks so much for being with us.
KENNARD: Thanks so much for having me, Scott.
SIMON: And I gather this is, at least, in part, inspired by an actual black-bag experiment in 1967?
KENNARD: That's right. At the University of Oregon and a professor called Charles Goetzinger, who was using it to test the mere exposure effect - the idea that we become fond of things just by encountering them over and over again, even if we dislike them at first. The experiment ran for a whole term, and the students at first disliked Black Bag and found his presence in the classroom abject and unsettling. But then they came to quite like him over the weeks, and they ended up standing up for him, if anyone criticized his appearance or his silence. And by the end of the semester, they were sort of inviting him out for the kind of end-of-term party...
SIMON: (Laughter).
KENNARD: ...Even though he never said a thing. He never responded when he was spoken to. They'd come to love him on some level.
SIMON: What does Dr. Blend, the professor at the unnamed university in your novel, hope the man in the black bag may call forth or bring out?
KENNARD: He's towards the end of his career, and I think he's trying not to be jaded. He's trying to still believe in the reason he first went into education, sort of passion for his subject and sharing it with impressionable young people. And he's become obsessed with this particular experiment, and he's reiterated it. We sort of find out over the course of the novel, this - I think it's, like, the 25th time he's done it, but it always goes wrong in some terrible way. So this is the last time he's running the experiment and hopes that this might be the kind of - the perfect appointee to the role.
SIMON: But don't actors want to play roles that express more than just sitting inside a black bag, or is that the challenge?
KENNARD: I think partly that's the challenge. I think also the narrator is so disappointed. So he's 37, and he's been trying to be an actor for most of his adult life, and all he can get is sort of murder mystery dinner theater, which he sort of hates, or sort of experimental issues-based theater, which he hates even more. And he's quite a sort of theater snob, in a way, and he would rather be in Ibsen or Chekhov, and just none of those roles are available to him. So in a way, I think it's almost him as a kind of active protest against his own ambitions, in a way. To be Black Bag is to kind of just try to remove himself from the equation in some way and just play a nonrole, a nonself.
SIMON: There's an attraction that develops with an accomplished professor named Justine. Should I call it a love story?
KENNARD: Yeah, yeah. No, I think so.
SIMON: What does she find compelling about the man in the black bag? Well, about the black bag. She doesn't really know it's a man for a while.
KENNARD: Yeah. Yes. And she's a professor of posthumanism, which I sort of read up just enough about to be able to give her some insights into it. But she is fascinated by, I suppose, this idea of erasure, but particularly as it relates to masculinity. So she talks about some of her consultancy work that she does outside of lecturing in the tech industry with a lot of troubled or sort of toxic young men who are making terrible decisions and that she's paid to try and sort them out in some way. And I think she sees Black Bag as a potential therapeutic method of making them more conscientious or just making them more aware or even just sort of, you know, silencing them for a little bit, putting them in a bag for a bit.
SIMON: She says, at one point, I think it's about masculinity, right?
KENNARD: Totally. That's it for her, and I think because it is sort of a slightly haunting, silent figure or sort of imago, right? So everyone projects their own desires or professional needs or interpretations onto him. And the narrator is sort of passive enough to just let that happen, or is uncertain enough to be like, well, maybe that is it, maybe I can go along with this.
SIMON: I find myself thinking, we often regard people as black bags, don't we? - filling in the blanks for suppositions we make without really knowing.
KENNARD: Right. I think that's it at the core - right? - it - that it's that level of subjectivity, which almost needs to be a constant reminder to ourselves that everybody is inwardly as confused, as occasionally brilliant, as awful, as conflicted as we are, I think. And I - yeah, I think there's always that risk of other people being reduced to flatter characters for us. I think for him, it's in the context of his professional, creative and romantic kind of frustrations or feelings of inadequacy. But I think - again, I think that's sort of universal.
SIMON: I have to ask - you teach creative writing at the University of Birmingham.
KENNARD: Yeah.
SIMON: I did mark some other words you wrote from Dr. Blend. (Reading) We're supposedly the finest minds in our respective disciplines, but we're required to spend most of our time boring, hungover teenagers to sleep.
KENNARD: (Laughter) Yeah. It's - I mean - and, you know, I should add that my own students are brilliant and surprisingly...
SIMON: Right. Well, I didn't think...
KENNARD: ...Committed (laughter).
SIMON: ...That was any - yeah.
KENNARD: (Laughter) But it's - but I think that is a sort of - it's a strange irony of the profession of lecturing.
SIMON: Have any of your students shown up in a black bag?
KENNARD: (Laughter) I'm waiting for that. I'm waiting for that to happen. I've been invited to a reading where they've asked me if I'd be willing to dress as a black bag myself, which I don't know 'cause I think I would have trouble either seeing the book or turning the pages. Yeah. No, I'm waiting for somebody to turn up to a lecture next week in full black leather oblong bag. That would please me greatly.
SIMON: All right. Well, let us know. Luke Kennard, his new novel, "Black Bag." Thank you so much for being with us.
KENNARD: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
