Blood Test
A Comedy
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3.8 • 13 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
From the winner of the PEN/Malamud Award and “one of our most gifted writers” (Chicago Tribune) comes a comic novel about a divorced Midwestern dad who takes a cutting-edge medical test and learns that he has a predisposition to murder.
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 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Baxter (The Sun Collective) pokes fun at religious do-gooders, conservatives, and the medical community in this entertaining if slight offering. Mild-mannered Brock Hobson, a divorced insurance salesman and Sunday school teacher, lives in rural Ohio with his two teen children and is romantically involved with a widowed park naturalist named Trey. At a doctor's appointment, Brock opts into an experimental blood test offered by a startup company in Cambridge, Mass., which purports to predict the future behavior of its test subjects. To Brock's surprise, his results forecast a life of crime, including murder. Though Trey laughs the prediction off, Brock flirts with his supposed fate by shoplifting, and after his ex-wife's boyfriend uses a hateful slur against Brock's gay son, Brock sees red. Then the start-up tries to sell him insurance in case he kills someone, causing him to wonder if he's being scammed. From there, the story barrels toward a violent climax. The ending feels hasty, but Baxter's sharp observations and ear for dialogue are on full display, and he molds a distinctive protagonist in Brock, who thinks of himself as righteous even as he judges others and corrects their grammar. Readers will love seeing Brock break bad.
Customer Reviews
Oddly likeable
I'm afraid I shy away from reading light-hearted books—they so often seem rather banal. But having been through a rather difficult year emotionally and personally, I decided to give this read a try because it has so many positive reviews. I tend to read mostly books that win or are nominated for some sort of award. Ultimately, I am not dissatisfied with the book. In fact I kind of question why I only give it 4 stars. Perhaps it's my bias about light-hearted books . . . and that isn’t fair, in fact i think that makes me seem like an elitist—but it may be more another bias I have . . .
Early on in the book it's obvious that we’re dealing with a Christian writer. While he's not dogmatic about that part of himself, he mentions it enough that you have to realize it's part of the overall theme. The book is not at all preachy, but I had a sense that it was trying to take me someplace I don’t want to go. It never pushed too hard, but it was there, right down to giving the book, chapter, and verse to make his point. You can actually look up his source in the Bible, which seems perhaps a tiny bit of dogma, but not enough to make me put the book down. You will notice I’m couching my terms, here because I’m freely badly about what I’m admitting, but it is how I feel.
I don’t want this review to be a spoiler, but I wonder about the writer's “BTW” moment at the end when he writes: I guess this book is . . . . I think either he couldn’t quite finish his initial idea about what the book would be or it was his intention all along. That didn’t spoil the book for me, but I don’t think it's entirely kosher.