If you had a chance to take a blood test that would predict your future behavior, would you do it?
That's what small-town Ohio insurance salesman Brock Hobson, the protagonist of Blood Test: A Comedy by veteran novelist Charles Baxter (The Sun Collective) decides to do. In this disarming tale of love, family, and the things that give our lives meaning, the consequences of that decision are both startling and hilarious.
In the course of a visit to a local clinic seeking the cause of stabbing pain in his side and back, Brock makes an "impulse purchase" of an expensive blood test offered by the vaguely described company Generomics Associates of Cambridge, Mass. When the results come back--boasting an accuracy rate of 94%--they reveal that he will engage in criminal behavior, or as the doctor informs him, "felonies are definitely in your future." Indeed, in a follow-up call, a Generomics representative ominously warns him, "We see a murder. Committed by you."
Brock is a "low-wattage sort of person." He has such an orderly life that he's known to his family as "Mr. Predictable"--manifested in his status as a respectable businessman who teaches Sunday school and prides himself on his charitable inclinations. So these dire prophecies provoke for him an understandable psychological and emotional tailspin, and the true joy of Baxter's story comes as he carefully peels back the layers of Brock's life to reveal the angst bubbling beneath its placid surface.
His most prominent source of agitation is his ex-wife Cheryl's relationship with subcontractor Burt Kindlov, someone Brock has known and despised since they were in first grade together. Even though he's in an affectionate new relationship himself, Brock can't shake his dismay over the fact that Cheryl left him for a man who's more physically attractive, but far less intelligent and decent. Does Brock hate Burt enough to kill him? That's the question that propels the novel's action, providing some of its sharpest comic and dramatic moments.
Brock is an appealing everyman who possesses a vivid imagination and a droll sense of humor that surfaces in trenchant observations about life and death, and in his compulsion to correct the grammatical errors of everyone he encounters. Baxter has always excelled in portraying scenes of Midwestern domesticity. Here, that takes the form of Brock's tugs of war with his sexually avid 17-year-old daughter, Lena, and her boyfriend, Peter, along with Brock's 15-year-old son, Joe, who he fears may be suicidal. Anyone who has ever felt overwhelmed by moments of sheer absurdity amid the pace of life in 21st-century America will identify with Brock Hobson's pain and pleasure and celebrate Charles Baxter's skill in capturing it. --Harvey Freedenberg, freelance reviewer
Shelf Talker: A small-town businessman submits to an unconventional blood test that radically changes his outlook on his quiet life.