Is there a pleasure as a reader in being quietly let down? In having your expectations unfulfilled? I mean, that experience of being surprised by the end of a book, and in the moment, you think oh, really, that’s it? That maybe that was a whimper and not a bang. And the quietness itself is disconcerting, even disturbing.
But then, as you wake and live into another day, and another day after that, the contours of the book come back to you. And you realize that that ending which initially disappointed you may have done so only because you disappoint yourself (don’t we all?), and so the ending, and the book itself begins to grow on you, even though you haven’t touched it since finishing it, now more than two weeks ago.
This experience of reading I’ve had more than a few times with the work of Charles Baxter, a writer I truly admire. And the boomerang effect which I’ve tried to capture in the sentences above definitely happened to me after I finished his latest novel, Blood Test.
Reader, this is such a strange book!
The novel’s main character, Brock Hobson, during a routine medical appointment, decides to spend extra money to take a special blood test that claims to predict his future based on the results of the test. That sounds a little far-fetched, as my dad would say. Yes, and the book only keeps fetching farther and farther. The test, administered by hucksters of a high but highly credentialed order, predict murder and mayhem on a grand scale for the seemingly mild-mannered Brock, an insurance salesman, Sunday School teacher, and father of two teenagers.
If this plot description seems more than a little weird and convoluted, then I have done my job as a reviewer in representing it. And yet, I felt compelled to continue reading, often breathlessly, page after page, chapter after chapter.
Why? Certainly there is the craft of the writer–Baxter’s prose is easy on the ears, and the book is chock full of great lines. More than that, though, is the book’s attentiveness to family as an institution in society in tension with family as a community of human beings. And in particular to that community experiencing the reorganization, reorientation, and disorientation that comes with divorce, remarriage, and the blending of families and step-parents.
At the beginning of the novel, Brock and his ex-wife Cheryl have divorced a while ago, and we are in the marriage’s aftermath. But since there are two teenaged children Brock and Cheryl are parents of, the interactions between the ex-spouses are a good deal of the content of the novel. (And also drive a good bit of the novel’s plot.)
The effects and consequences of the blood test and its prophecies are dramatic. Loud. Violent. But right alongside that noise, woven in like a whisper, are quieter feelings: sadness, befuddlement, wonder in the wake of the marriage’s wreck, and the re-arrangement of the family unit and its relationships. The juxtaposition of these two elements worked for me as a reader.
I should add, too, that as a high school teacher, and a cradle member of a mainline Christian Church (yes, Catholics are Christians, too), I also very much admired and resonated with Brock’s Sunday School dialogues with his students, which were of course peppered with curious questions and wonderfully real back and forth that point up our human inadequacy before the mysteries we Christians testify to. In the midst of one such classes, one of Brock’s young pupils says:
“...I don’t get why a person has to forgive everybody. Just because the Bible says it? I don’t get that. My mom doesn’t forgive people. And she’s my mom. She has…I can’t think of the word.”
“Grudges?” I suggested.
“Yeah, she’s got those. Why’s she supposed to forgive everybody?”
“Because—” I started to say when the others all spoke up.
As the passage above indicates, Brock is often overrun and overruled by the youngsters in his care, and that includes his teenage children as well. But as this passage also shows, Brock as a first-person narrator is delightfully and comically honest (how perfect is that one word response: “Grudges?” I suggested). Baxter’s Brock illuminates, throughout the novel the many ways our lives fall short (oh so short) of that pesky and impossible gospel we Christians are (supposedly) trying to put into practice.
I’m sure there are lots of my coreligionists who will disagree with me, but I found Brock to be a very nourishing character to contemplate. He stands squarely in the line of all of those followers of Jesus (starting with the first ones) who don’t understand his teachings, who can’t figure out how to put them into practice, and yet keep on trying all the same. And manage to tell the truth–as much as they can bear–about their own lives.
Late in the story, Brock finds himself (and that is the right verb for it) to his great surprise a gun-owner, and hunter, two things he never thought he’d be. After killing a small animal in a park preserve, he writes:
At that moment I came to my senses, and I thought: what am I doing here? Who amI? What am I becoming?
I was not myself. As quickly as I could, I walked out of there to my car, and in haste I drove home.
I’m not asking for sympathy. This is not that kind of story. I’m just telling you what happened.
Such a direct and relentless gaze Brock is startled to be casting on himself. He is genuinely surprised at his own capacity for violence. Yes, the tone and tenor of that realization is very much of this time, a representative 21st century American male having an epiphany. But on the Sunday School line (a thread I doubt other reviewers will spend quite as much time on as me) it also reminds the reader of good old Saint Paul, who in addition to writing and inspiring most of the New Testament, let us not forget, was also a murderer.
It’s late in the telling of his tale that Brock reveals to us that he is writing it with the help of his friends at the Blueberry Hill Writing Workshop. Sometimes this kind of move–I’ll call it a ‘meta-move’--where the writer reminds us of the artificial nature of what we’re reading and experiencing–can be annoying. It can pull the reader out of the “dream” of the work.
In this case, though, Baxter’s choice to have Brock be an aspiring writer and even acknowledge that in the pages of his novel, works. It reminds me of the great value of words to make sense of our lives, which can so often seem like so much nonsense.
Even when we don’t have fancy degrees or vocabularies, we can all try to find the adequate words to tell our story, often with the help of a good teacher, sometimes with our own Blueberry Hill gang (credentialed or not).
These folks help us “not to ask for sympathy.” These folks support us in simply “telling what happened.”
Readers looking for a book that speaks to the ways honesty and truthtelling are at the same time inconvenient as well as deeply compelling, will find Blood Test a worthy companion. And if they’re like me, they may even find the story sparks some insights, stories, and truths about their own place in this strange and wondrous world we live in, together.
Notes:
-All of Charles Baxter’s work is worth your time. But I especially recommend his ‘craft’ books on the art of fiction. I recently read and was bowled over by the brilliance of Wonderlands, which in essay form, hits on similar themes in Blood Test. But also have read and re-read his excellent The Art of Subtext and Burning Down the House.
-On the subject of review, I recently had a book review of my own published–and not on this Substack! Check out my review of poet Philip Metres’ excellent collection of poetry, Fugitive / Refuge, at Commonweal Magazine.
I would hope that you are going to send this wonderful review/reflection to the author. This may be one of the most perceptive readings his book will receive.