Blood Test by Charles Baxter

Published by ‎ Pantheon on October 15, 2024

The quality of being ordinary might seem like a curse to ordinary people. We are often told that none of us are ordinary, that everyone is special. When a Sunday school student tells Brock Hobson that he’s special, not ordinary at all, he rejects the premise. He knows he has no superpower. He thinks of himself as just one of God’s creatures, a boring one at that. Blood Test suggests that living an ordinary life with decency, charity, and forgiveness might be a superpower that anyone can develop.

Brock sells insurance in a small Ohio city. He has teenage kids — a son and a daughter — with his ex-wife Cheryl. His wife left him for Burt because Burt, while a complete idiot, is unpredictable (meaning impulsive), while Brock is “predictable as a clock.” Burt is also good looking and great in bed, qualities that offset his idiocy in Cheryl’s mind.

Burt belongs to a cult that believes particles in plastic bottles have “wormed their way into your bloodstream and your brain. The plastic promotes indifference and apathy and online shopping.” I knew there was an explanation!

The kids spend most of their time with Brock, even when they’re supposed to be with their mother. Burt belittles Brock’s son Joe because Joe is gay. Cheryl assures Joe that she loves him “even though you’re queer.” Brock’s daughter Lena is in love with her boyfriend and plans an idyllic lifetime with him, beginning by attending the same college. But when does the future ever follow a teenager’s plan?

Brock is a decent, conventionally religious midwestern guy. He feels sorry for the dead animal when he sees roadkill and imagines their last frightened moments of life, “though my grief is not excessive.” Brock is dating a woman he calls Trey. Her superpower is standing very still until deer and birds will take food from her hand. They make a good couple.

The novel’s amusing plot follows Brock’s response to a shady sales pitch for a product that can, by testing his blood and analyzing his answers to bizarre questions, predict his future. Brock would like to know whether he will do anything interesting with his life, so he pays the fee and takes the tests. The company predicts that he is “about to embark on a major crime wave. It’s all down on paper. I wish you luck and Godspeed.” He later learns that the crime spree will include a murder. Fortunately, the shady company can sell him insurance that will pay for his legal defense. The company even sells him the gun he will use to commit the crime.

It occurs to Brock that he now has complete freedom, including a license to kill. If bad acts are destined, we can hardly be blamed for committing them. “I can go wild,” Brock thinks. “I have a perfect alibi. The mainframe has said so.”

Apart from struggling with the ramifications of losing free will, Brock needs to decide how to address his son’s dark writings and drawings, the kind of things that parents should see as red flags. An apparent lunatic gives Brock some simple advice for dealing with his son: “Ask him what he wants.”

It’s probably not a spoiler to say that Brock (who occasionally speaks directly to the reader) reveals that the book isn’t about a blood test at all, but is actually a love story. I’m not sure I see it that way, although it might be a bunch of love stories, a romcom with an ensemble cast. Brock’s daughter is in love or in lust with her boyfriend. Brock’s love for Cheryl still motivates him to help her despite his betrayal. Cheryl’s love for Burt — even after Burt suffers a disability for which he blames Brock — is inexplicable. Brock’s love for Trey and for his son are integral parts of the story.

Brock might be predictable, but the plot is not. It leads to a duel, but only after Brock nearly shoots someone by accident. Gun violence is a problem in society that only becomes larger when someone as inept as Brock is armed. One of the novel’s lessons is that ordinary people don’t need guns.

Another lesson — at least in Brock’s view — is that being handsome makes life too easy. For losers like Burt, “having any woman you want degrades your character. The whole idea of monogamy stops making sense.” No sensible woman would want Burt for anything but his body. “Except for the gym and the hunting, Burt is lazy and empty-headed. He’s quite at home here in America, if I could generalize for a moment.”

There are also lessons in tolerance and forgiveness, on top of the question of free will. Fortunately, the lessons blend nicely with the plot’s goofiness. They don’t come across as lectures and never get in the way of the genuine laughs that the story inspires.

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The President's Lawyer by Lawrence Robbins

Published by ‎ Atria Books on October 8, 2024

The male characters in The President’s Lawyer have trouble keeping it in their pants while the female characters have trouble keeping their pants on. Well, the story is set in D.C. and most of the characters are politicians or lawyers, so that’s believable.

The novel is set in a time similar to ours, except D.C. is a state. Two elections ago, Jack Cutler defeated President Smith, who promptly founded a far-right TV network and began a campaign to convince voters that Cutler stole the election. Smith’s network blamed Cutler after a murder was committed by a migrant who Cutler pardoned for a minor drug conviction. Having been Willy Hortoned, Cutler was soundly defeated in the next election.

During his last year in office, Cutler had an affair with Amanda Harper, a White House lawyer who handled subpoenas directed at the Executive Branch. When Amanda’s body is found in a park, Cutler is accused of killing her. The accusation is supported by the presence of his DNA and fingerprints on her clothing. Amanda’s body had rope burns on her wrists, a fact that Cutler attributes to rough but consensual sex. It turns out that Cutler has had rough sex but consensual sex with other women, including his wife Jess.

Cutler wants his old friend Rob Jacobson to defend him. Rob has a rich sexual history of his own, a history that includes shagging Jess before she married Cutler and doing the same with Amanda before she dumped him for Jack. It is foolish for Rob to even consider representing Cutler given his personal connections to the victim, to Cutler, and to Cutler’s wife (who might be a suspect in the murder of his extramarital lover, after all), but the chance to represent a former president in a murder case is too tempting to resist. Besides, Cutler probably pays his legal bills, unlike some former presidents. Cutler’s trial constitutes the bulk of the plot.

Most of the novel’s characterization is devoted to Rob. He was an abused child. Perhaps for that reason, he manifests twitches and facial tics when he’s stressed. He also blames himself for a childhood friend’s drowning when she fell through thin ice. Rob revisits his past when his violent brother (very much an anti-Culter voter) shows up during the trial after making himself unreachable for years. Cutler’s family has a history of mental illness that extends to his own schizophrenic son, who may have had a grudge against Amanda for (in his view) breaking up his parents’ marriage. In the logic of the plot, any of these might be the true killer, assuming that Cutler isn't.

Legal thrillers depend on engaging trials and on characters who teach readers the “inside baseball” of criminal defense. Those are the strengths of Lawrence Robbins’ novel. A reader might quibble that experienced prosecutors would understand the theory that mitochondrial DNA can be recovered from a hair that doesn’t have a follicle, but the prosecutors in the story seem blindsided by a defense expert’s testimony to that effect. A reader might wonder why prosecutors failed to notice that a critical note on a key exhibit was written in a different color ink than the other notes on the same document. Prosecutors blunder on occasion, but these blunders only occurred because they were needed to advance the plot. In most other respects, the story is credible.

The reveal — the killer’s unmasking — brings a final twist to the story. I award points for its surprising nature and deduct nearly the same number of points for its unconvincing nature. Yet Robbins plays fair by planting subtle clues that might predict the ending. Although I was mildly disappointed with the reveal, The President’s Lawyer excels at the best part of any legal thriller: balancing drama and realism when crafting cross-examinations worthy of Perry Mason.

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A Woman Underground by Andrew Klavan

Published by Mysterious Press on October 15, 2024

A Woman Underground begins with a prologue, but it is the prologue to Treachery in the Night, a self-published novel that portrays white nationalists as the nation’s saviors. A character named Miranda is living with a brute named Theo before a bigger brute named Moran marches Theo into the woods and returns to claim Miranda as his prize.

Cameron Winter believes that Miranda is modeled on a girl he loved before he was old enough to understand the emotion. Winter arrives at this conclusion after recognizing the girl’s perfume outside his door and then glimpsing someone in a security video who might or might not be his old flame Charlotte. The woman is carrying a book with a partially exposed title. Winter matches the partial cover to Treachery in the Night, starts reading the book, and concludes for no obvious reason that Miranda is Charlotte. Winter rides an improbable logic train, but improbability is the norm in modern thrillers.

Winter is an English professor who formerly worked as a spy or assassin for one of those shadowy government agencies that are a thriller staple. Winter is a broken man. He meets regularly with Margaret Whitaker, a therapist who presumably has a security clearance. She replaced a therapist who fell in love with Winter. Margaret is also in love with him, making me think that Winter must be quite the hunk — or that women just dig assassins.

Despite her feelings about Winter, Margaret wants him to make a date with a woman who asked him to ask her out. She believes his obsession with Charlotte is preventing him from moving forward with a potential relationship. Most people abandon their childhood crushes when they reach adulthood, but Winter can’t for reasons that Margeret articulates after reaching deep into her bag of packaged explanations for stupid behavior.

Winter decides he needs to track down Charlotte, so there we have a plot. The endeavor brings him into contact with white nationalists and other disreputable people. The story takes place against a vague background of riots, violent clashes between left and right in unidentified cities.

Winter’s search for Charlotte is interwoven with a story from his past involving a search for Jerry Collins, an agent who disappeared while investigating child traffickers. Jerry’s disappearance relates to his knowledge of powerful men sleeping with kids — so many powerful men that they would fill Jeffrey Epstein’s island, but men with an appetite for sex partners who are even younger than Epstein’s. Frankly, the novel’s portrayal of nearly all powerful men as child molesters defied my usual willingness to accept the unbelievable for the sake of enjoying a thriller.

The story takes an odd turn when Cameron learns that his colleague, Roger Sexton, is carrying on with a student who makes a habit of shagging faculty. Cameron is too virtuous to sleep with a student, or perhaps he’s so hung up on his teen crush that other women fail to activate his libido. In any event, Roger’s dalliance with the student becomes an increasingly bizarre component of the plot and takes center stage when the student disappears. The circumstances of her disappearance again strained the limits of my willingness to get lost in the story.

Andrew Klavan has an addiction to adverbs that requires serious treatment. His prose is competent but unpolished. The pop psychology upon which Winter’s personality is based is probably needed to explain Winter’s obsession with Charlotte, but at least he has a personality. The wannabe Nazi characters are cartoonish, although I suppose that characterization might be accurate. Most members of America’s far right are not serious people.

Apart from its credibility issues, the plot is muddy. The major components — the search for Jerry, the search for Charlotte, and the drama that arises out of Roger’s sexual involvement with a student — do not fit together well. Roger’s plot thread comes across as filler that is included to pad the word count. On the other hand, a final twist in the epilogue is satisfying. While the story will probably maintain the interest of thriller fans, I doubt that they will become invested in plot threads that, in the end, just don’t make much sense.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Eurotrash by Christian Kracht

First published in Germany in 2021; published in translation by Liveright on October 22, 2024

The narrator in Eurotrash shares the name of the novel’s author. Whether the story is autobiographical I don’t know, although the narrator is a writer whose first novel was Faserland, as was the first novel of the real Christian Knacht. The line between the fictional Christian and the real one is blurred when the narrator’s mother, out of the blue, asks him whether is aware that they “are being described in a book right now, like Cervantes?” Blurring the line between reality and fiction is a staple of postmodern fiction, but I can’t say it ever impresses me.

Fictional Christian’s father, like the real Christian, had a father named Christian. After World War II, Christian’s fictional father was sent to America “to learn about democracy and bring it back to a ravaged Germany.” His father invented a fictional life in America, bragging of feats he never achieved. The novel’s early pages recount Christian’s attempt to learn the truth about his father.

Like a good bit of fiction from Germany, Eurotrash tentatively explores the impact of the Nazi party on the descendants of Hitler’s faithful. Christian blames his family for doing too little to resist the Nazis (particularly a grandfather who went through denazification and returned to Germany to organize a new group of Nordic nationalists). “The people to blame for the entire misery of the world are you and me,” Christian tells his mother.

Christian’s mother celebrated her eightieth birthday in a psychiatric ward. She was released to her apartment in Zurich because (in Christian’s view) she is able to fool doctors into believing she is in sound mental health. Christian’s mother enjoys cheap white wine, vodka, and phenobarbital. Perhaps those substances scramble her brain, but they probably help her cope with the repeated rapes she endured when she was eleven.

Christian tells himself that it is “an indication of mental health to be able to adapt to such a deeply disturbed family.” Christian may be fooling himself. Although Christian visits his mother in Zurich once a month, she complains that he is not an attentive son. Christian decides to take her on a trip, with the secret goal of depositing her in a vegan commune he saw in a brochure. He plans to tell his mother that the commune is a luxury resort and then disappear.

Christian hires a driver and off they go. Christian’s mother stops at her bank and withdraws a bag full of cash for their trip. She has a colostomy bag but she just fired her housekeeper, the only person who knew how to change it. On the trip, the task falls to Christian, much to his chagrin.

The commune’s pro-Nazi philosophy is not what Christian expected. The road trip continues, to Feutersoey for trout, to the mountains to see edelweiss in bloom, to Morges to see the house where Christian’s father died, finally to a Geneva cemetery to visit the grave of Borges. Perhaps Christian will even take his mother to Africa to see zebras, something she insists she has always wanted to do. Or perhaps he will tell his mother that she is in Africa and trust that her flirtation with dementia will turn the story into reality. Or perhaps his mother simply wills her own reality into being.

While Germany’s history hovers over the story like a storm cloud, the story that eventually emerges is personal. It is the story of a mother and son, both of whom feel guilty about the absence of a firm connection. They spend most of their road trip quarreling, perhaps developing a new understanding of each other, perhaps approaching a forgiveness that goes unspoken.

Although steeped in family history, the story generates sympathy for its two central characters, notwithstanding their aggravating natures. Christian’s approach to his mother is passive-aggressive, while his mother’s approach to her son is manipulative. Christian sometimes pokes at his mother, at other times listens silently as she criticizes him: “I simply preferred silence, as everyone had preferred to swallow down and conceal and keep everything secret, for a whole dead, blind, and nasty century.” The dynamic between the characters, culminating in a surprising and ambiguously touching ending, gives the novel its tragic soul.

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I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom by Jason Pargin

Published by ‎ St. Martin's Press on September 24, 2024

I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom is both an indictment and a celebration of the internet. It’s also one of the funniest books I’ve read this year.

Abbott Coburn is an incel. Like other incels, he blames women for problems that extend beyond involuntary celibacy. Abbott has an anxiety disorder and depends on his medication to function. Even medicated, Abbott has no social skills.

Abbott lives with his father Hunter and earns money from a ride-share app by driving Hunter’s SUV. Abbott was bullied in high school and blames high school girls for the bullying because girls reward bullies with sex. Abbott has joined the hordes of young male vloggers who insist that they are victims of a conspiracy. The conspirators are either feminists or attractive women who won’t shag them, depending on the moment.

Abbott is such a dunce that he’s almost likeable. The dynamic between Abott and his father encourages the reader to feel Abbott is far from evil and not irretrievably lost to the internet’s dark side.

A woman named Ether asks Abbott for a ride across the country, from the West Coast to the East. When he explains that the app does not permit long-distance travel, she offers him a large payment of cash to work off the app, half in advance, provided he leaves behind his phone and laptop. The other hitch is that she’s transporting a large black box that might or might not display radiation decals. A mysterious employer paid Ether a large amount of cash to bring the box to his place outside of D.C.

Abbott sets aside his suspicion of women and accepts Ether’s terms because he needs cash to reboot his life. He soon realizes that Ether didn’t tell him that she’s being followed by a biker named Malort who wants to acquire the box for his own (presumably nefarious) purposes. Things get out of hand when Reddit users begin tracing Abbott and Ether on their trek, having convinced themselves that they are terrorists or heroes, no theory being too crazy to express as a certainty.

The story picks up additional characters as it bounces along, some of whom live almost entirely in the digital world. Zeke Ngata is in a wheelchair. He’s active on Reddit and a fan of Abbott’s vlog. Phil Green was a genius who lived off-grid in Canada. An anti-technology conspiracy theorist, Phil was convinced that software was rewiring human brains to turn us into zombies. Maybe he was right, but Phil is dead now, survived only by his blog. Phil had the black box when Ether first saw it, although he refused to reveal its contents.

A former FBI agent named Joan Key has a long list of problems (that’s why she’s a “former” fed). She sees the black box as an opportunity to rekindle her relationship with the FBI. Or, if she’s lucky, she’ll be near the box when it explodes, perhaps gaining postmortem recognition for her effort to avoid a catastrophe.

Key contributes to the narrative by expressing interesting opinions. She attributes school shootings and other random acts of mass violence to “aggrieved narcissism, a total inability to put personal affronts into perspective. Why shouldn’t others die for your petty humiliations, when you’re the Main Character of the Universe”? Key teams with Hunter to find Abbott before a wannabe internet hero kills him.

The characters come together in an action-adventure comedy that is driven by misunderstandings and (since people get their information from questionable internet sources) outright fabrications. The story is amusing — and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny — for multiple reasons, but my favorite is its depiction of Reddit as a haven for “mostly young males with a vast arsenal of shallow knowledge and free time.” Transcripts of Reddit conspiracy theories surrounding Abbott are hilarious. Was he taken hostage by a crazy woman? Was he abducted by aliens? Does the box in his father’s SUV contain the radioactive corpse of an alien? Is the box stuffed with the corpse of a woman who disappeared while visiting the state where Abbott lives? Is Abbott a terrorist who intends to set off a dirty bomb in Washington D.C.? Are people who post groundless conspiracy theories working for Russia or is that also a groundless conspiracy theory?

A reader might surmise that the title refers to the black box in Abbott’s SUV, but the “black box of doom” actually refers to the screens on our communication devices and the algorithms that assure our exposure to bad behavior, driving us to fear the badly behaving, who are inevitably depicted as people different from ourselves — different by race, gender, political affiliation, place of birth, or any other factor that allows us to distinguish ourselves as good people, unlike all the different kinds of people who are always causing trouble.

Abbott’s arguments with Ether about female manipulation of males are insightful in their realistic portrayal of opposing viewpoints, even if the viewpoints of both characters are easily mocked. I agree with Abbot’s view that it’s silly for women to put on a bikini and then complain that they feel objectified when they are noticed by visibly appreciative men. But it’s even sillier for Abbott to claim that he’d rather be raped than to be falsely accused of rape because rape victims get sympathy while society always condemns accused are men.

Ether wants to teach Abbott a lesson that all incels should internalize — “you can actually get over bad things that happen to you.” The story at least forces Abbott to grow up, to start making decisions for himself rather than blaming the world for his empty life.

What’s in the box? The answer, carefully set up by scenes that might quickly be forgotten in this fast-moving story, is delightful. Just know that the climax is wild and funny. Some scenes have the credibility of Road Runner cartoons, but comedy doesn’t need to be credible.

I would recommend the novel just for its goofiness and the Looney Tunes feel of its final act, but I am even more enthused about the characters’ semi-serious discussions of significant social issues: the potential impact of growing up with screen interactions rather than human touch; the incel movement that links young men with stunted social skills; and the ridiculous (and potentially dangerous) nature of the conspiracy theories that these socially challenged men devote their lives to spreading in the hope of improving their self-worth. Those are discussions that society should be having. For that reason, I'm Starting to Worry would be a good book for book clubs that actually discuss books rather than gossiping about book club members who didn't make it to the meeting.

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