Philip Roth famously worried that good satirical fiction was impossible to write in America because actual America was too absurd and too extreme to effectively parody. In an essay published in Commentary in 1961, he wrote:
The American writer in the middle of the 20th century has his hands full in trying to understand, and then describe, and then make credible much of the American reality. It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates, and finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to one’s own meager imagination. The actuality is continually outdoing our talents, and the culture tosses up figures almost daily that are the envy of any novelist.
Of course, much good satire has been written in America, notably by Roth himself, and in his new novel, Blood Test, Charles Baxter is more than up to the job of describing an actuality that, over six decades after Roth’s lament, is if anything more stupefying, more sickening, more infuriating.
Take, to begin with, the setting: a small Ohio city called Kingsboro, “a cesspool of pollution, addiction, and potential Superfund sites” led by a mayor of questionable ethics and other “elected mediocrities who sometimes behave like the clowns at the Shrine Circus”; where, given that two thirds of the population have either a drinking or a drug problem, “a healthy person over the age of twenty-five acquires a certain charisma”; where the county highways are in such bad shape that driving on them is like “one of those knock-your-teeth-out thrill rides”—and this is perhaps the only thrill to be had in the region, where yet another ill besetting citizens is “boredom: that American problem.”
At Famous Discount, Kingsboro’s main store, shoppers
are confronted with…hollow-eyed minimum-wage employees, beaten-down wage earners, most of them indifferent to anything that happens in the store…. Most of the merchandise…is quite worthless and no one would bother to steal it, much less buy it.
In any case, the security guards are usually hungover and snoozing.
The commodities seem to have been laid out by stoned half-wits. The drugged employees have no idea where anything is. Given all the disarray, shoppers…can feel the store’s contempt for them. If they respected the customers, they’d sort this shit out.
But no matter where in America we happen to be, there are good people. And the person speaking here, the book’s narrator and main character, is undeniably one of them.
Brock Hobson is a successful insurance salesman (in his own words, “a bureaucrat at heart”) and the divorced father of two teenagers, Lena and Joe. Though he and his ex-wife, Cheryl, share custody, the children prefer living with their dad. Seventeen-year-old Lena has a boyfriend named Pete, who spends much of his time at the Hobsons’, where he and Lena are permitted to share a bed (which is where they’re mostly to be found). Brock has a girlfriend named Trey, who in the course of the novel becomes his wife and moves in with the family as well. As the head of household Brock cuts a blameless figure: loving, patient, responsible, competent. He is also a Sunday school teacher and a member of the Blueberry Hill Writing Workshop, to which, as it turns out, we owe Blood Test’s existence.
Cheryl is Brock’s opposite: a woman so impulsive and unreliable that Lena and Joe have learned not to trust her, “not even for lunch money.” Two years earlier she dumped Brock and ran off with a subcontractor named Burt, a man with gross habits, a gambling problem, a thing for conspiracy theories, and a hatred of liberals. He belongs to a cult called R/Q Dynamics that espouses a crackpot self-improvement philosophy with a close resemblance to Scientology and that, out of love for him, Cheryl joins too. Burt’s “imperturbable ignorance about the world” disgusts the college-educated Brock:
If you were to ask him where Italy is located on the globe, he wouldn’t know but would despise you for asking. Did I mention his hat? No. But you can imagine the hat. I don’t have to explain everything.
No—except perhaps what Cheryl could possibly see in this creep? Brock grudgingly acknowledges that Burt is exceptionally handsome and well built. But it remains one of the hardest facts of his life that his wife has chosen such a nasty piece of work over his own decent self. In his unfailingly honest way, however, Brock also acknowledges that boredom had everything to do with Cheryl’s flight—not just the boredom of taking care of a house and kids or of working nights as the manager of a 7-Eleven, but boredom with him, her devoted and wholly predictable hubby.
But despite his wife’s betrayal, and despite his jealousy and utter abhorrence of Burt, Brock is not given to bitterness or revenge. He dutifully pays Cheryl alimony, and when she pleads for additional money to help pay for a new roof for her and Burt’s house, he demurs only briefly before obliging.
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“Everybody including me says I’m as predictable as a clock,” Brock admits. Or a metronome, according to his daughter—“not praise, coming from her.” Looking back at his high school days, he recalls how his party animal classmates did whatever the hell they wanted, never apologizing, never showing any guilt:
But not me. I played by the rules, all the rules, every single rule. Someone had to do the dishes and clean up after everyone else had staggered home or passed out on the lawn…. I somehow skipped over the fun and the craziness because I thought that Heaven was my destination. My church and my parents had convinced me of that.
His classmates called him Old Man and voted him “the one most likely to become a parole officer.” Now that he’s an adult, his worst fault seems to be an obsession with correcting other people’s grammar errors. (His own perfect grammar is a benefit of having been taught by Jesuits at the Catholic school he attended as a boy.)
And so one day, when the doctor he’s consulting about vague pains in his torso tells him about a start-up called Generomics Associates (“bunch of Harvard and MIT graduates, they tell me, mostly in molecular biology and computer science”) and how, using a simple blood test, they’ve developed a way to predict a person’s future behavior, and that this test is available to the general public, Brock is intrigued. Though the test is expensive, he decides to go ahead with it. Aside from providing a blood sample, he is asked to respond to a long questionnaire, which includes such bewildering questions as “If you are married, how long was your honeymoon?” and “What is your preferred method for opening tin cans?”
“One of the most unusual genome blood tests and questionnaires that we have ever processed,” a Generomics representative says of Brock’s results. In addition to “drug taking and possible antisocial tendencies,” his future is said to hold more serious criminality—we’re talking “felony-level misbehavior.” When Brock suggests that there must be some mistake, he is told that the company’s “giant mainframe computers and the algorithms that they’ve come up with in Cambridge, Massachusetts, have never been wrong…. Our AI machines are made in Germany. We have experts with degrees from Yale.” No doubt about it, the rep warns him, “you are about to embark on a major crime wave.”
The obvious absurdity of all this is not lost on Brock. One gets the sense that—perhaps at least partly out of that old problem, boredom—he’s just playing along to amuse himself. He knows he’s almost certainly being scammed. (Among several red flags is the fact that he can’t find anything about Generomics on the Internet.) On the other hand, like most human beings, he’s not entirely insusceptible to fraud. Who is he to argue with Ivy League brainiacs? (Anyone who doubts that sober, intelligent people could fall for such a scam need only recall the Theranos blood test scandal, which Baxter clearly has in mind.)
On his way home from the consultation about his test results, Brock stops at Famous Discount intending to buy some pruning shears and astonishes himself by stealing them instead. Hardly a felony, but could this be the beginning of the predicted crime wave? Brock has an epiphany: “I can do anything I want to. I can go wild. I have a perfect alibi. The mainframe has said so.” The act arouses in Brock unaccustomed feelings of freedom. It’s as if he’s been given back the youth he missed out on because he was too busy following all the rules. What he’s surprised to discover he does not feel, however, is guilt.
But Brock has other, more pressing things on his mind, such as the deepening seriousness of his relationship with Trey, a woman as upright and kind as Cheryl is neither, who works as a naturalist at a county wilderness park. As a couple they get along well, and Brock gets along reasonably well with his children, who, though at times impatient or mocking toward him, appreciate that he is stable, caring, and a good provider, “the only Gibraltar rock,” as Brock says, “in a landscape of sand and broken promises.”
Brock has some concerns about Lena’s relationship with Pete. They might be in love now and having lots of sex, but what will they do once “the inevitable boredom sets in”? (That demon, again.) Far more worrying is the recent behavior of fifteen-year-old Joe. While cleaning his room, Trey discovers what appear to be suicide notes that Joe has left lying about. When Brock learns that the main reason for Joe’s depressed state is the homophobic bullying that Burt subjects him to, he is furious. “Aided by the Generomics blood test” (or so he supposes), he finds himself blurting out that he’s going to kill Burt, alarming his son, who tries to calm him down. In a confrontation with Burt at his and Cheryl’s house, an accident occurs. The scene is slapstick (Burt slips on a banana peel), but the consequences are horrific. Burt’s injuries put him in a coma and, once he comes out of it, in a wheelchair.
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How responsible is Brock for Burt’s fate? That he’d long wished for something bad to happen to Burt cannot be denied. It is also true that Burt would never have slipped and fallen backward down a flight of stairs had Brock not poked him in the chest. In his own defense Brock says, “All I wanted from him was an apology and some compassion for Joe, not a skull fracture.” Whose fault is it that Burt’s punishment turns out to be “outsized, as if God, or fate, or my own wily unconscious hadn’t been paying close attention to what I had asked for, what I had really wanted”? “Somehow,” Brock thinks, “God had lost a sense of scale. Or maybe I had.”
More questions: Did this violent episode prove that the Generomics people were right? Was Burt Brock’s first victim?
At first Trey pooh-poohs the blood test results, but when she starts to see changes in Brock she becomes scared. “Even when you’re sleeping, you’re different,” she says. She blames the “evil” people, either scammers or crackpots, who “have cooked up a bad business to make money in the worst way…. They gave you permission to do anything and everything. Everything is permitted once they say so. Don’t you see?” (I confess I myself never did see the logic for the assumption, which several characters seem to share, that Brock has been given an alibi, “a get-out-of-jail-free card,” or “a license to kill.” Why would the predictability of a crime exculpate the future perpetrator? Did the Omniscient absolve the sin of Adam and Eve? Was Judas not guilty because Jesus foresaw his treachery?) Trey, who lost her dearly loved first husband in a freak accident, now fears losing Brock as well.
Shortly after Burt’s fall, Brock is called in for a second Generomics consultation. Apparently, thanks to an app he wasn’t even aware had been installed on his iPhone, the company knows all about the theft of the pruning shears and the altercation with Burt as well as many other things, down to the stain on the necktie Brock is wearing. And now a new readout from the central mainframe in Cambridge predicts that Brock is going to commit a murder. The doctor suggests he take out an insurance policy that will protect him against any and all damages once the inevitable occurs. Like a man bewitched (or maybe just in a mood), Brock ends up acquiring not only the policy but a white lab rat. (That Brock needs a pet in his life is yet another piece of information gleaned from his test analysis.) And though he does not agree to buy a Finn 23, an “excellent defensive firearm,” when later that day one arrives, along with bullets, on his doorstep, courtesy of Generomics, he keeps it.
What is it about a gun? In a particularly effective passage, Brock describes what happens to him once he becomes one of the millions of Americans who own a firearm. Learning how to shoot, he reports:
My blood began to surge…. I felt the heat in my chest and thighs and in my balls, even in my hands, almost (you could say) as if I were transforming myself, de-virginizing myself…into a different man altogether, someone who didn’t take orders but gave them out, a commander. I’m talking about power and consequence and invulnerability. I was growing bigger, stronger than I had ever been…. Anything I had ever feared began to fall away, as if the Finn had given to me an insurance policy that could never be canceled as long as I had another magazine full of bullets.
A bit over the top, maybe, but nonetheless convincing.
Now that the gun has appeared, we know it must go off—and not just on a firing range. Indeed it will go off more than once, and a second and a third gun will appear, and they too will go off, as Baxter’s increasingly zany story spins toward its climax. (“If you don’t like zany,” Brock quips early on, “you probably shouldn’t live in America.”) There’s a killing too: the senseless shooting of a small forest creature. But none of this violence occurs in any way that is probable, let alone predictable.
That our hero is incapable of becoming the evildoer he’s algorithmically said to be is something the reader understands from the beginning. Nevertheless, his agreement to submit to the blood test leads inexorably to what will be a definitive moral test, and Baxter’s deft pacing and frequent narrative twists keep the suspense mounting. The Generomics characters might be crooks, but his encounter with them forces Brock to face a dark truth about himself, which is a truth about human nature: how susceptible we are to the temptation to do wrong, to do harm. And for the first time in his life he finds himself asking whether he really is the person he has always thought himself to be.
Laughable and lovable, equal parts schlemiel and mensch, Brock makes an ideal protagonist for a comic novel. I could have stayed in his entertaining company for many more pages. He would have been better served, though, by a more engaging supporting cast. Brock’s “nearly typical teenagers” remained, for me, too typical, lacking distinct personalities, and Trey’s uncomplicated goodness only flattens her character, as saintliness in a fictional character is wont to do. (Moved by the sight of his beloved as she stands in the woods hand-feeding birds and deer, Brock conjures up an image of Saint Francis, and the only thing that remotely bothers him about living with this “gold-standard human being” is her habit of not flushing the toilet after urinating, so as not to waste water.)
At the other end of the spectrum from Trey is Burt, the novel’s villain and a true grotesque. You can feel the author’s hostility toward the Cro-MAGA male rising like steam off the page. “Except for the gym and the hunting, Burt is lazy and empty-headed,” says Brock, who cannot resist pressing the point: “He’s quite at home here in America, if I could generalize for a moment.” If anyone in this story could be called boring or as predictable as a clock, it is Burt, who can always be counted on to say or do the dumbest, most loutish thing. Once, while impugning Brock’s patriotism, Burt vaunts his own: “I’ve got a hard-on for the Stars and Stripes.” Cheryl, though hardly a sympathetic or likable character, is at least given a moment of grace. After the misfortune that destroys Burt, including his once-enviable looks, we might expect her to abandon him as she once abandoned Brock for far less; instead she becomes her now helpless partner’s tender and unselfish caretaker. But for Burt there can be no such moment. The man is irredeemable. Indeed, he is portrayed with such fierce contempt, his ruin is detailed with such sadistic glee, that it made me wince.
“I think this story has been about love and not about the blood test in the title.” By the time Brock tells us this, he doesn’t really have to. His marriage to Trey looks to be a long and happy one, and he finally concedes that, inexplicable though it may seem, Cheryl loves Burt, and Burt, “in his brutish, disabled, stupid way,” loves her back. Brock continues to help out the wretched couple financially, explaining, “Charity is maybe a bad habit with me, but it’s who I am” (a humblebrag that struck me as out of character for the usually sincerely self-deprecating Brock). Besides, he says, Cheryl is the mother of his children, and though she’s been a terrible parent, “I know they love her.” And he can afford to be generous: business is good. As for the kids themselves, we leave them knowing that, whatever growing pains they might be going through, they’ll be all right. Needless to say, nothing bad happens to the rat.
In his essay Roth asked:
If the world is as crooked and unreal as I think it is becoming, day by day; if one feels less and less power in the face of this unreality, day by day; if the inevitable end is destruction, if not of all life, then of much that is valuable and civilized in life…why is it…that so many of our fictional heroes…wind up affirming life?
This is still a really good question.
