A blood test to predict behavior? This novel finds humor in that scary premise

“You fall down here in Kingsboro, Ohio, you’re in good company,” says Brock, the narrator of Charles Baxter’s new novel, “Blood Test.” True enough, a lot of things are going sideways for Brock and those around him in this fictional town. His ex-wife’s new boyfriend is a boor who spouts doctrine from a distressingly Scientology-esque group. His teenage son seems to be planning self-harm. His teenage daughter has grown overly cozy with her boyfriend. Who wouldn’t want a little certainty in the face of all this?
The setup for “Blood Test” is a careful-what-you-wish-for answer to that question. During a doctor’s visit, Brock is invited to take a blood test by a firm called Generomics Associates that “predicts behavior, tells you what you’re going to do before you do it.” Thanks to advanced medical technology and AI, we can now work predictive wonders for society. Great! Less great: The test informs Brock that he’s almost certain to commit a heinous crime.
A lot of criticisms of contemporary American life spill out of this straightforward, almost folkloric setup. It takes on scammy pseudoscience (think Theranos and its own false promises for blood tests). Gun culture. Legal mumbo-jumbo. Church culture. Protestant predestination. Cults. Manifest Destiny. The algorithm. Masculinity.
Baxter, a veteran storyteller who’s been nominated for a National Book Award and written and edited multiple books on the craft of fiction, is gifted at giving each of these social stressors their due while keeping the story moving. The novel is subtitled “A Comedy,” but he’s written something closer to a farce — a story in which every predicament is intentionally absurd. (“If you don’t like zany you probably shouldn’t live in America,” Brock notes.) And it still feels a lot like reality.
Told he’s now all but helpless to become a hard-core criminal, Brock — a straight-spined, humble insurance salesman and Sunday-school teacher his son dubs “Mr. Reliable” — starts flirting with petty theft. Perhaps a little shoplifting will forestall any more serious transgressions? Nope: Hearing that his ex-wife’s new partner, Burt, has been using homophobic slurs toward his son, Brock insists on a confrontation. There are words. Cue the banana peel. Suddenly, Burt has a debilitating skull fracture.
Whether this constitutes an accident, a violent attack or a fuzzy kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, forces outside of Brock’s control are instantly set in motion. Generomics, which gets wind of Burt’s fate, arrives with new data for Brock, a promise of an insurance policy and the delivery of an unwanted gun. Brock’s girlfriend looks at Generomics and sees an existential nightmare: “They gave you permission to do anything and everything. Everything is permitted once they say so.”
Brock is a tick more restrained, though. He thinks of his high-school friends for whom “guilt slid off … like rainwater off a goose.” Why not him too? The internet says he’s fated to be evil, and the lawyers say even if he is, he’ll be spared jail time. Maybe having a conscience is overrated in this brave new world.
That’s the biggest, juiciest target in “Blood Test”: an America whose citizens are encouraged not to think, or only to think selfishly; where we should expect to get away with anything, aided by technology. It’s an idea that a novelist can explore only in comedy to avoid looking like a scold.
And “Blood Test” is a funny book, if of a careful sort. Sometimes Baxter will go for a throwaway gag line (“Women don’t like it when you make generalizations about them”) or a quirky scene (he watches a B-movie in which a robot somehow becomes pope). But mostly Baxter is a deadpan artist: He’s made Brock as blandly Midwestern as possible to put the wildness of contemporary American life into sharper relief.
In that regard, “Blood Test” is a kind of inheritor of Don DeLillo’s classic “White Noise,” another tale about a just-so Midwestern family fractured by technology and the creeping sense that we’re no longer in control of our own destinies. Like DeLillo, Baxter is moved to satirize the ways that every atom of our consciousness seems to be up for sale. (“We have ways of monetizing dreams, if you’re interested,” a Generomics doctor tells Brock. “These are bargain dreams. We could bring you in on the ground floor, pennies on the dollar.”) But Baxter has removed some of the iciness of DeLillo’s prose, allowing Brock to be a warmer postmodern patriarch.
It’s not giving too much away to say that “Blood Test” ends with a duel — there are few better ways of symbolizing America’s us-versus-them culture. It is also, in a time of regular mass shootings, an almost quaint, comic way to frame a battle of wills. “Ours is a violent country where a single bullet rarely matters,” as Brock puts it. That’s not an obvious laugh line. But after Baxter has laid out the parade of selfish, money-hungry, blindly tech-admiring elements of contemporary life, the black comedy of the words shines through.
Mark Athitakis is a writer in Phoenix and author of “The New Midwest.”