Product Description

From Nicholson Baker, best-selling author of Vox and the most original writer of his generation, his most controversial novel yet.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1108135 in Books
• Published on: 2005-04-12
• Released on: 2005-04-12
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 128 pages

From Bookmarks Magazine
If you don’t like George W., you might like Checkpoint—at least its uncontrolled rage against the administration. In his seventh novel, Baker focuses his trademark style of writing minutiae on a rambling conversation between two Bush detractors. “[It] makes Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 look like a work of Jamesian subtlety and nuance. There isn’t a graceful or interesting sentence in this blunt, plotless, obscenity-laden screed,” says Entertainment Weekly. The New York Times Book Review calls it a “scummy little book.” Other reviews did not improve the book’s (or political tirade’s?) standing. Checkpoint may be worth reading as a passionate analysis of the Iraq war, but, even with its heightened emotion, it’s not a very original or engaging one.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

From Booklist
Jay and Ben are old friends who haven't seen each other in a few years. A former teacher who has fallen on hard times, Jay is very, very upset about the war in Iraq. He has expressed his objections by marching in an antiwar demonstration in the nation's capital, but the protest has had no effect. Now Jay has asked Ben, a writer currently working on a book about the cold war, to bring a tape recorder to a Washington, D.C., hotel room because Jay wants to talk about his decision to assassinate the president. Nervous and incredulous, Ben anxiously debates with his keyed-up buddy. He is also deeply distressed by the atrocities in Iraq and the immoral covert actions of Bush and Cheney and their cohorts, but he knows that murder is not the answer. Once again the chimerical and fearless Baker has written a work of provocative and razor-sharp fiction, this time crafting a nail-biting duet for two voices under duress that incisively charts the emotional turmoil generated by the horrors and conundrums of war, terrorism, dirty politics, and repression. Place this beside Barry Lopez's searing short-story collection Resistance [BKL My 1 04] and Philip Roth's towering novel The Plot against America [BKL Ag 04], and you have a triptych of lacerating works of the imagination that insightfully and cathartically confront the urgent issues of the day. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
"Compelling . . . a passionate cry from the heart." --USA Today

“A ripped-from-the-headlines docudrama for the printed page, a timely and tense screed for a divided country hurtling toward who knows where.” --Associated Press

"Checkpoint is about limits - of presidential power, of law, of discourse, of rationality, and of language itself." --Boston Phoenix

"Sly, slender but important . . . Baker excels at writing about those facets of the human experience we prefer to hide." --David Kipen, San Francisco Chronicle

"This novel could be a kind of record of our times. . . . Its goal is to take [the] internal combustion process of hatred and anger and make it visible--which Baker does brilliantly." --Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

"Baker's new novel checks its inhibitions at the door . . . entertaining, edgy and unpredictable." --Las Vegas City Life

“If one of our supreme chroniclers of mild manners can be roused to such patriotic indignation, democracy yet has a fighting chance.” --LA Weekly

"On the whole, Baker improves upon Samuel Beckett's [Godot]. Baker's jokes will make people, rather than theatre majors, laugh." --P. J. O'Rourke, Los Angeles Times

"An astonishing, uncomfortable conversation. Baker has a real ear for the cadence and wryness of the modern intelligentsia." --Portland Oregonian

“Checkpoint is like a hornet: It’s small, quiet, with a sinister aspect to its midday peregrinations, and it has a stinger: conscience.” --Toronto Globe and Mail

"High humor, ghastly seriousness." Kirkus (starred review)


From the Hardcover edition.

Customer Reviews

ASSASSINATING ASSES, AND OTHER SUBPLOTS
First off, some reviewers on this site fault Baker for trifling the otherwise formalized cottage industry of Bush-slandering with something as puffy as an assassination. Anyone who has read the novel until its denouement will know that this is simply incorrect. The script never equates legitimate anger at the duplicity and dishonesty of the Bush administration with assassination, the whole "plot" of our crazed protagonist is meant to come across as silly as our second character so laboriously keeps grinding at.

That cleared, this scamming little novella may not sport the sparkling prose of a typical Baker tome but it offers a delectable flavour in its own right.

The text is in its entirety a dinner-table conversation between two friends, one a fanatic opponent of Bush's invasion of Iraq and thus contemplating killing the president with a giant rolling ball (and other contraptions like it, let's not dwell on trivia that're to be savoured in Baker's customary bizzare prose), and the other a wiser, more balanced sort attempting to dissuade his friend with murderous tendencies.

With this scaffolding, Baker presents not only some very interesting trivia such as an updated version of Napalm being allegedly employed in Iraq despite all claims to the contrary (apparently because the formula is technically different; more lethal now) but also some very opinionated insights into the heart of the matter.

Barring the somewhat twisted inference that our assassin-wannabe draws from his indignations, or the odd out-of-place rant on evils of abortion and such, this is quite a clever little conversation that shouldn't take more than a couple of hours to devour from cover to cover.

I'd recommend it in a blink.

Talk. Life.
After reading Leon Wieseltier's absurd review in the New York Times Book Review, I was prepared to be outraged or at least disappointed by Checkpoint. Instead it turned out to be an enormously intelligent account of the political consequences of Baker's tender commitment to life -- to life as what is in the details, which is the point of all his books, or the bass note playing through them. What happens when you take all life seriously, as the dissuader Ben does, even the life of a man who doesn't, like Bush? And what life finally is, is the ability to...talk. There's a lovely, actually empathetic account of how Bush smiles when he finds a word when he's talking. That's what life is: talking. That's what Ben keeps Jay -- the would-be assassin -- doing. Talking. As in Vox, so in Checkpoint. Yes the book is a (justified) screed against Bush's policies. But ut justifies itself, because it's about screeds, about why the proper response to political evil, to thoughtlessness, is speech. Not just "free speech" but talking, where talking means (sometimes) caring for the crazy person you're talking with.

Weiseltier's review, by the way, neglects to mention that the book attacks to of his colleagues at The New Republic by name, Also that Baker himself was mentioned in the Star report, since Bill Clinton was carrying around a copy of Vox that Monica Lewinsky gave him, a novel represented as pornographic or at least steamy (even by Maureen Dowd, who should have known better, and who is a friend of Weiseltier's). And he completely misrepresents the end of the book, which is unambiguous, and represents the triumph of talk, and then of just looking around.

This is not my favorite of Baker's novels, but it may be his most courageous, and certainly makes the case for why his kind of novel is important: it puts life -- any life -- over death.

A quirky book
This book is a little like Baker's Vox from a few years ago. It is a minor success. There should be more books about killing George W. Bush. I hope that this is the first in a trend.