BLOOD TEST

An insurance salesman learns that he’s predisposed to murder in this comic novel.

Brock Hobson doesn’t mind being, as his daughter says, “as predictable as a metronome.” He works as an insurance salesman in Kingsboro, Ohio, a town where “a third of the town has a drinking problem, and another third is on meth and/or Oxy,” and volunteers as a Sunday school teacher, spending evenings with his girlfriend, Trey, and his two teenage children, Joe and Lena. (Their mother, Cheryl, lives with her new beau, Burt, a doltish subcontractor whom Brock notes “fits quite comfortably into the Mr. Asshole category.”) When Brock goes to a doctor complaining of a pain in his side, the physician convinces him to take a blood test invented by a company called Generomics that “predicts behavior, tells you what you’re going to do beforeyou do it, based on the…arrangementsin your genetic structure, your psychology, and your past and your what-have-you.” Brock, an upstanding citizen whose only bad habit is correcting other people’s grammar, is surprised when the test reveals that he is “about to embark on a major crime wave.” He fulfills the prophecy—well, kind of—when he confronts Burt after the man calls Joe, who’s gay, a homophobic slur; Burt slips on a banana peel and ends up hospitalized with a grievous injury. Brock, who’s given a gun by Generomics, starts to realize that the company actually wants him to commit a murder: “It’s in their interests financially for me to shoot somebody.” Baxter’s novel is riotously funny, and much of the humor comes from asides: A doctor tells Brock, “Anyway, except for the fact that you’re feeling these pains, and you complain that you can’t breathe and you’ve lost your appetite and there’s a tightness in your chest, and you feel like you’re dying, you’re fine”; in another scene, Brock browses DVDs including Alien vs. Bimbo and Voodoo Chiropractor! At its core, this is a disarmingly sweet novel about family, an entertainment with just the right amount of Midwestern menace.

Hilarious and humane.