Customer Reviews

Checkpoint: A Novel

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(13)
3 star:		(11)
2 star:		(9)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

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.

I suppose it's a sign of the times that I feel strange checking this book out of the library, what with the Patriot Act, and now writing a review on Amazon.com. Hell, if the F.B.I. kept a file on Ernest Hemingway, they certainly have one on Nicholson Baker after this brave book.

The novel is written as a transcript of a taped conversation between two friends, Ben and Jay. The book's a quick read at just a little over 100 pages and can be devoured in a few hours. The intense conversation captures Jay's rage at Bush and his bloody crusades in Iraq, and while Ben empathizes, he is the voice of reason trying to keep Jay under control. Jay rails about the mutilated Iraqi children, Bush and friends' shameless self-enrichment while others suffer, etc. Ben, who appears to be more interested in history than the present, tries to get Jay interested in photography, and tells him that he has to concentrate on the beautiful trees, not the metaphorical gnats swarming around him.

If you're at the library or bookstore, do yourself a favor and breeze through this book. Anyone should be able to feel an echo or twinge of Jay's rage when he depicts the gross aggression and hypocrisy of this Administration. While the reader probably won't agree with the entirety of what Jay says, the dialogue is powerful and affecting.

This book will be even more grimly relevant if Dubya manages somehow to win the upcoming election. The neocons are itching for more war and the silver-spoon simian is happy to appease them. We are a few small steps from reinstatement of the draft and other morbid reminders of Vietnam. If this happens, I am sure the streets will be filled with Jays.

I think that people who try to take the political content of this book seriously are missing the point. The point of the book, like any good novel, is not in scoring political points but exploring the lives of the people involved in the novel. Because the political point of view of the two protagonists is contemporary, it's hard not to react to the political statements being made. Not surprisingly, then, many reviewers have considered the book as a political tract and have commented on how valid the political analysis is (maybe it helps to be Canadian).

But that's not the point: The point is seeing two people living in the United States in 2002/2003. While the protagonists do, occasionaly, make points that real political commentators make, they also make absolutely loony points. Like a David Mamet or Harold Pinter play, the pleasure in this book is the dialog (the book is all dialog), the characters, and their relationship.

When reading this book it might be worthwhile to take the long view: Assume that the protagonists are living in the time of Louis XIV and are considering assissinating the king. In that frame of mind, you wouldn't care about the politics and would only interested in the people. On that basis, I enjoyed the book. What is impressive to me is how much the author reveals about the characters and their values through the incidentals of the character's conversation. We see two people who really have given up on any hope of influencing their country's direction (or even the direction of their own lives) and who can not tell the difference between fact and supposition. They have come to the point where the only difference they believe that they can make in the public sphere is through some spasmodic dramatic action.

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.

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.

i've read baker before ("mezzanine") and this is an entirely different approach. gone are the minute observances and analyses of passing moments and events, implying significance in detail. in its place, barely mitigated rage -- in the form of a dialogue between two erstwhile friends, representing temptation and discipline -- directed at the dubya administration. but that, of itself, represents a different kind of observation.

many people will concentrate on the fact that the novel is framed as a persuasive argument (a dialogue, almost in theater form) for and against killing a sitting president, and that's for some a violation of "holy" edict. but that's really a sideshow within the book, imo, which is more of a discourse on the popular perception of futility and despair in the state of american government affairs, and is vivified by resultant (and altogether common) anger. it also pays to note that the novel could have just as well been written from the republican point of view about killing clinton.

the dialogue moves quickly if obsessively and rambling, and the book is a short and easy read. the conversational language is typical of the informal stream-of-consciousness literature of our times, which robs the language of any poetry but is widely accessible even among the barely literate. symbolism is somewhat heavyhanded -- some of it made necessarily ridiculous by the need to skirt american law regarding our demotic royalty.

works like this from intellectual authors -- especially one that has built a reputation on close observation -- appear only in times of great political stress, imo. the very existence of the book is perhaps its most interesting feature, serving as a sort of standardized-testing oval in an examination of our society that we can now shade in with our No. 2 pencil. as an observation of our world, it is a warning for the perceptive -- the understanding and compromise and patience of days gone by is fraying, even if it is still usually reached, and the end of civil peace may be approaching.

In a remarkably novel narrative style - pure conversation between the only two characters in this novella, Baker provides an interesting take on the issues surrounding US politics. The war in Iraq is used as a centerpiece, along with divergent topics such as impact of Walmart, abortion, army, Halliburton/Enron, and a multitude of other issues that have gotten more than their share of headlines and extremist talk-show pundits. While the conversation between the two characters tend to become artifical at times, it is mostly engaging. The viewpoints expressed by either characters provide no new pespectives on the issues, and hence the whole book does not score much on originality. The book certainly plays to the anti-Bush and anti-war crowd, and attempts to provide a modicum of rational thinking when the main protagonist is being "calmed" by the other character. Overall, an easy-read, fairly novel narrative technique, a simple enough plot, strong (albiet, unoriginal) arguments against war and Bush.

The is a sparse novel concentrating on two characters political conversation regarding the current regime. One of the protagonists wishes to kill the president. It is of course, a half-baked vague plan that is more to get attention and further one's egotism than a serious plot. This is the brilliance of the book that so many miss out on. The subtlety of the characterizations are brilliant. Like most people speaking about politics, some of the points are valid, others begin to drift into far fetched conspiracy theories. Baker walks the line brilliantly: he presents us with a character who we all meet in our everyday life. The language used and the forcefullness of the emotions are foregrounded, asserting a brilliant parody of armchair foreign policy theororists; if such a thing exists.

"Checkpoint" is a political argument disguised as a book. No descriptive prose, no description at all actually, simply a scripted conversation in a hotel room between two friends, Jay & Ben. At the very start Jay informs Ben he is planning to assassinate President George Bush for the war atrocities in Iraq.Your reaction to the book will probably be influenced by your own opinion of whether you think Bush and his administration were wrong to invade Iraq. I don't know if anything new is shed in the course of the argument that hasn't already been said beyond a theory of why abortion should be outlawed. However, the book is interesting at the very least as an emotional response to what many people think is a wrong and terrible war.

When reading all the praise of Nicholson Baker's prose, on the dust jacket, and his ability to use the English language to create a satirical edge, I expected something more substantial. Apparently, this is case of reputation leading the book. There is nothing funny (except the Bush seeking Bullets), nor ironic in the text, and satire is checked in at another hotel. One cannot feel any emotional impact the ravings of Jay, as he plots to kill the bush baby in the White House. (Although, I suspect that if Shrub could read, the book just might make him catatonic.) This really is not a novel, but a one-act play.