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.
