Blood Test: A Comedy
He’s written something closer to a farce — a story in which every predicament is intentionally absurd ... After Baxter has laid out the parade of selfish, money-hungry, blindly tech-admiring elements of contemporary life, the black comedy of the words shines through.
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Funny ... As with any successful knockout punch, part of its force is that you don’t see it coming ... By announcing itself a comedy, Blood Test isn’t wrong, but it undersells itself. It is a profound and unsettling — and, yes, frequently funny — snapshot of our current tribulations, cast in relief against the stubborn peculiarities of the American character.
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Billed as a comedy, and it is a comedy mostly in that it is not a tragedy. Is it funny? Yes, but darkly so; its humor, which is delightful, is wrapped around truths and drama and so, while we laugh, we also feel a shot of anxiety. It is a wonderfully crafted book, more complicated than it first might seem ... The humor in the book — and there is plenty, including a nod to slapstick involving a banana peel — comes from the absurdity of the situation and from the narrator’s droll asides ... A novel about family — the way they love each other and protect each other and look out for each other.
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