KIRKUS, STARRED REVIEW
Brock Hobson doesn’t mind being, as his daughter says, “as predictable as a metronome.” He works as an insurance salesman in Kingsboro, Ohio, a town where “a third of the town has a drinking problem, and another third is on meth and/or Oxy,” and volunteers as a Sunday school teacher, spending evenings with his girlfriend, Trey, and his two teenage children, Joe and Lena. (Their mother, Cheryl, lives with her new beau, Burt, a doltish subcontractor whom Brock notes “fits quite comfortably into the Mr. Asshole category.”) When Brock goes to a doctor complaining of a pain in his side, the physician convinces him to take a blood test invented by a company called Generomics that “predicts behavior, tells you what you’re going to do beforeyou do it, based on the…arrangementsin your genetic structure, your psychology, and your past and your what-have-you.” Brock, an upstanding citizen whose only bad habit is correcting other people’s grammar, is surprised when the test reveals that he is “about to embark on a major crime wave.” He fulfills the prophecy—well, kind of—when he confronts Burt after the man calls Joe, who’s gay, a homophobic slur; Burt slips on a banana peel and ends up hospitalized with a grievous injury. Brock, who’s given a gun by Generomics, starts to realize that the company actually wants him to commit a murder: “It’s in their interests financially for me to shoot somebody.” Baxter’s novel is riotously funny, and much of the humor comes from asides: A doctor tells Brock, “Anyway, except for the fact that you’re feeling these pains, and you complain that you can’t breathe and you’ve lost your appetite and there’s a tightness in your chest, and you feel like you’re dying, you’re fine”; in another scene, Brock browses DVDs including Alien vs. Bimbo and Voodoo Chiropractor! At its core, this is a disarmingly sweet novel about family, an entertainment with just the right amount of Midwestern menace.
Hilarious and humane.
In this fresh take on love and trouble in America, Brock Hobson, an insurance salesman and Sunday-school teacher, finds his equilibrium disturbed by the results of a predictive blood test. Baxter, a master storyteller, brings us a gradually building rollercoaster narrative, and a protagonist who is impertinent, searching, and hilariously relatable. From his good-as-gold, gentle girlfriend to the excessively macho subcontractor guy his ex-wife left him for, not to mention his well-raised teenage kids, now exploring sex and sexuality, the secondary characters in Brock's life all contribute meaningfully to the drama, as increasing challenges to his sense of self and purpose crash over him. The final battle—no spoilers, but there is one—couldn't be more delightful, as this quick and bracing novel reminds us to choose the best people to love, accept the ones we love even if we didn’t choose them, and love them all well.
“Blood Test is a funny, morally luminous, altogether irresistible caper that somehow, wonderfully, calls to mind both Nietzsche and Charles Portis. What a maestro Charles Baxter is.”
JOSEPH O’NEILL, AUTHOR OF AWARD-WINNING BESTSELLER NETHERLAND
BOOKLIST
A deeply funny, profound, and timely comedy.
PEN/Malamud Award–winner Baxter delivers another immensely enjoyable novel, following The Sun Collective (2020). Brock Hobson is a seemingly milquetoast insurance salesman and Sunday-school teacher who, in an out-of-character decision, takes an experimental predictive blood test offered by his doctor. The results, provided by the wonderfully named Generomics, state that this predictable and mild-mannered divorcé is very likely to commit a murder. Ever aware of this supposed predilection, Brock must navigate his ex-wife and her homophobic boyfriend and his teenage children and their distinctly adolescent experiences of love, lust, pain, and drama while delightfully odd interruptions arrive at his door from Generomics, as it seemingly tries to put its thumb on the scale to ensure its prediction is right. Brock is a wry joy to accompany through all of this, and his circumspect humor is similar to that of Joshua Ferris’ dry and distant protagonists. A deeply funny, profound, and timely comedy about the contemporary overreliance on data to predict everything and anything, Baxter’s latest is another excellent tale to add to his much admired and enjoyed body of work.