Blood Test: A Comedy
“Blood Test may offer a dark view of aspects of middle America, but it is consistently amusing and is an expression of its author’s deep fascination with and love of flawed, eccentric Americans . . .”
The narrator and central character of Blood Test tells his readers, “If you don’t like zany, you probably shouldn’t live in America.” Blood Test is quietly zany, reminding one of the writings of another Midwesterner, James Thurber. Even the epigraphs to the sections of the book, all quotes from the late Hungarian-born conductor Eugene Ormandy (“Who is sitting in that empty chair?”) match the quietly hilarious tone of this delightful novel, in which someone actually slips on a banana peel.
Brock Hobson seems to be a colorless model citizen of an Ohio town. He is a successful insurance salesman and conscientious Sunday School teacher at the First Faith Free Church. He is devoted to his teenage children, in love with his partner Trey (neé Gertrude), and uncommonly generous to his first wife who has run off with a doltish building contractor. Everyone says that Brock is one of the most predictable people they know. His most irritating trait is his penchant for correcting everyone’s grammar. Brock understands that “My youth passed me by without ever having been there.”
Yet underneath the seeming order is chaos. His teenage daughter is constantly having sex upstairs with her boyfriend. His gay son spends his time in the basement developing his physique so that he can defend himself against homophobic taunts. His girlfriend doesn’t believe in flushing the toilet. His ex-wife’s house is a total mess.
Brock’s life seems under control until he takes a series of tests designed by the Generomics Institute to predict one’s future behavior. Brock’s test results reveal that he will “embark upon a major crime wave.” The representative of Generomics offers him a pet rat, a handgun, and insurance to cover his future legal expenses. Brock’s initial response is a new sense of freedom: “I can do anything I want to. I can go wild. I have the perfect alibi. The mainframe has said so.” His criminality begins with stealing a pair of garden shears from his local discount store.
At first no one close to Brock believes that this dull, predictable man could become a criminal until a life-threatening disaster befalls his wife’s boorish boyfriend. Brock’s loved ones start to believe that perhaps he is dangerous. His wife’s boyfriend, who has developed an insane hatred, challenges Brock to a gunfight.
The offbeat situations in Blood Test are vehicles for Charles Baxter’s satire on the current state of America where trash culture prevails. Brock says of his wife’s boyfriend, “Except for the gym and hunting, Brock is lazy and empty-headed. He’s quite at home here in America, if I could generalize for a moment.” Middle-America is discount stores that peddle awful films like Pope Robot. Doctors don’t even care to get a patient’s name right. Sunday School students are more interested in movie superheroes than Jesus. Brock’s son tells his father, “Jesus didn’t live in the twenty-first century. And he didn’t own a handgun.”
Yet in the midst of chaos Baxter wants to offer positive Christian concepts of love and forgiveness. Brock sees his girlfriend, a naturalist, becoming something like St. Francis when, with handfuls of seeds, she attracts birds to perch on her shoulders and arms while animals surround her. He tells his Sunday School students that his superpower is raising people from the dead, and, metaphorically, he tries to do that with the people around him: “I can’t let them fall into suffering, even if the suffering is of their own making and well-deserved. Charity may be a bad habit with me, but it’s who I am.” He realizes that his story “has really been about love.”
Blood Test may offer a dark view of aspects of middle America, but it is consistently amusing and is an expression of its author’s deep fascination with and love of flawed, eccentric Americans as well as a celebration of old-fashioned values. Baxter’s laconic style allies him with earlier writers like Thurber, Robert Benchley, and Thornton Wilder. Blood Test demonstrates that laughter is still the best medicine.