It’s a challenging time for social satire: For one thing, the country sometimes seems as divided by what it finds funny as it is by politics. But Blood Test, a new novel by Charles Baxter, perhaps spans divisions because it draws upon a tried-and-true comic predicament: namely, the little guy who’s forced to punch above his weight with a larger entity.
That entity might be industry — as in Charlie Chaplin’s masterpiece Modern Times; or government and law-enforcement agencies — as in Jess Walter’s superb 2005 novel Citizen Vince, about an ex-con determined to exercise his right to vote for the first time. In Blood Test, the entity is the pharmaceutical industry.
The Everyman hero of this tale is a middle-age, divorced father of two named Brock Hobson, who sells insurance for a living in Ohio. One day, Brock makes an appointment at the local medical clinic to have a pain checked out. Here’s Brock’s description of the clinic and his fellow patients, a thumbnail description of a lot of places in America:
The [parking] spaces [outside the clinic] are usually filled. We have a lot of near-dead people in these parts. You can see them staggering in, breathing hard, young and old, propped up by their canes or walkers … It’s probably the postindustrial air we breathe here, or maybe the nitrate-scented water we drink out of the tap. Could be herbicides we spray on everything or the fact that a third of the town has a drinking problem, and another third is on meth and/or Oxy. You fall down here in Kingsboro, Ohio, you’re in good company. It’s a grand party of the infirm down there on the ground.
The doctor who briskly assesses Brock’s pain as stress-related also susses out that he has the money to purchase a product a medical start-up company is offering: It’s a blood test that can not only predict health problems down the road, but also behaviors, like say, romantic entanglements or promotions.
Brock impulsively signs up for the test which also requires answering a questionnaire with queries such as: “WHAT IS YOUR PREFERRED METHOD FOR OPENING TIN CANS?” and “IF YOU FOUND OUT THAT GOD DOES NOT LIKE YOU HOW WOULD YOU FIX THE PROBLEM?” Eventually the results come back, predicting that mild-mannered Brock will “embark on a major crime wave”; indeed, it’s likely he’s going to commit a murder.
What ensues is a screwball adventure (and I do mean “screwball” — there’s even a banana peel joke here!) in which Brock tries to outrun his homicidal fate and assert his individual free will.
If he is predestined to murder somebody, however, the most likely candidate would be Burt Kindlov — his ex-wife’s boyfriend. Burt is a handsome bully, deeply immersed in a Dianetics-type lifestyle practice. He’s also shamed Brock’s depressed teenage son for being gay. Brock deftly encapsulates his nemesis’ personality this way:
Burt has an imperturbable ignorance about the world and what people are really like. If you were to ask him where Italy is located on the globe, he wouldn’t know but would despise you for asking.
Humor, as we know, often arises from pain. Going back as far as his 2000 novel The Feast of Love, which was nominated for a National Book Award, Baxter has wielded wit and satire to entertain and to illuminate harder truths about the world his characters inhabit. Brock’s smalltown Ohio is a place where the most flourishing business, besides the medical clinic, is Famous Discount store, where customers can browse discount DVDs with titles like His Holiness Pope Robot and buy off-brand diet cola that “tastes like fizzy sugared cat food.”
For sure, it can be a “zany” place where people find themselves drawn to certainty through sketchy blood tests and lifestyle practices; but, as Brock says, “[I]f you don’t like zany you probably shouldn’t live in America. You can always go to somewhere like Switzerland …” In Blood Test, Baxter invites us to laugh at this all-American zaniness and to acknowledge some of the pain that fuels it.