A blood test to predict behavior? Charles Baxter finds humor in that scary premise

“You fall down right here in Kingsboro, Ohio, you’re in good firm,” says Brock, the narrator of Charles Baxter’s new novel, “Blood Check.” True sufficient, a variety of issues are going sideways for Brock and people round him on this fictional city. His ex-wife’s new boyfriend is a boor who spouts doctrine from a distressingly Scientology-esque group. His teenage son appears to be planning self-harm. His teenage daughter has grown overly cozy together with her boyfriend. Who wouldn’t need a bit of certainty within the face of all this?

The setup for “Blood Check” is a careful-what-you-wish-for reply to that query. Throughout a health care provider’s go to, Brock is invited to take a blood take a look at by a agency known as Generomics Associates that “predicts conduct, tells you what you’re going to do earlier than you do it.” Because of superior medical know-how and AI, we are able to now work predictive wonders for society. Nice! Much less nice: The take a look at informs Brock that he’s virtually sure to commit a heinous crime.

A number of criticisms of latest American life spill out of this easy, virtually folkloric setup. It takes on scammy pseudoscience (assume Theranos and its personal false guarantees for blood checks). Gun tradition. Authorized mumbo-jumbo. Church tradition. Protestant predestination. Cults. Manifest Future. The algorithm. Masculinity.

Baxter, a veteran storyteller who’s been nominated for a Nationwide Ebook Award and written and edited a number of books on the craft of fiction, is presented at giving every of those social stressors their due whereas protecting the story transferring. The novel is subtitled “A Comedy,” however he’s written one thing nearer to a farce — a narrative during which each predicament is deliberately absurd. (“When you don’t like zany you in all probability shouldn’t reside in America,” Brock notes.) And it nonetheless feels rather a lot like actuality.

Informed he’s now all however helpless to develop into a hard-core prison, Brock — a straight-spined, humble insurance coverage salesman and Sunday-school trainer his son dubs “Mr. Dependable” — begins flirting with petty theft. Maybe a bit of shoplifting will forestall any extra critical transgressions? Nope: Listening to that his ex-wife’s new associate, Burt, has been utilizing homophobic slurs towards his son, Brock insists on a confrontation. There are phrases. Cue the banana peel. Abruptly, Burt has a debilitating cranium fracture.

Whether or not this constitutes an accident, a violent assault or a fuzzy sort of self-fulfilling prophecy, forces exterior of Brock’s management are immediately set in movement. Generomics, which will get wind of Burt’s destiny, arrives with new information for Brock, a promise of an insurance coverage coverage and the supply of an undesirable gun. Brock’s girlfriend seems to be at Generomics and sees an existential nightmare: “They gave you permission to do something and every little thing. All the pieces is permitted as soon as they are saying so.”

Brock is a tick extra restrained, although. He thinks of his high-school pals for whom “guilt slid off … like rainwater off a goose.” Why not him too? The web says he’s fated to be evil, and the legal professionals say even when he’s, he’ll be spared jail time. Perhaps having a conscience is overrated on this courageous new world.

That’s the largest, juiciest goal in “Blood Check”: an America whose residents are inspired to not assume, or solely to assume selfishly; the place we should always count on to get away with something, aided by know-how. It’s an concept {that a} novelist can discover solely in comedy to keep away from wanting like a scold.

And “Blood Check” is a humorous guide, if of a cautious kind. Generally Baxter will go for a throwaway gag line (“Ladies don’t prefer it whenever you make generalizations about them”) or a unusual scene (he watches a B-movie during which a robotic someway turns into pope). However principally Baxter is a deadpan artist: He’s made Brock as blandly Midwestern as attainable to place the wildness of latest American life into sharper aid.

In that regard, “Blood Check” is a sort of heir of Don DeLillo’s traditional “White Noise,” one other story a few just-so Midwestern household fractured by know-how and the creeping sense that we’re now not in charge of our personal destinies. Like DeLillo, Baxter is moved to satirize the ways in which each atom of our consciousness appears to be up on the market. (“We now have methods of monetizing desires, if you happen to’re ,” a Generomics physician tells Brock. “These are discount desires. We may deliver you in on the bottom flooring, pennies on the greenback.”) However Baxter has eliminated a few of the iciness of DeLillo’s prose, permitting Brock to be a hotter postmodern patriarch.

It’s not giving an excessive amount of away to say that “Blood Check” ends with a duel — there are few higher methods of symbolizing America’s us-versus-them tradition. It’s also, in a time of normal mass shootings, an virtually quaint, comedian strategy to body a battle of wills. “Ours is a violent nation the place a single bullet hardly ever issues,” as Brock places it. That’s not an apparent snicker line. However after Baxter has laid out the parade of egocentric, money-hungry, blindly tech-admiring parts of latest life, the black comedy of the phrases shines by means of.

Mark Athitakis is a author in Phoenix and writer of “The New Midwest.”