Checkpoint: A Novel (Paperback)

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Key Phrases: White House, Cold War, Pentagon Papers (more...)

Editorial Reviews

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. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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 --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 128 pages
• Publisher: Vintage (April 12, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400079853
• ISBN-13: 978-1400079858
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.3 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (46 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #853,770 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars ASSASSINATING ASSES, AND OTHER SUBPLOTS, October 10, 2004

By	Shashank Tripathi (Gadabout) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Checkpoint: A Novel (Hardcover)

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.

17 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Talk. Life., August 16, 2004

By	W. Flesch (arlington, MA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Checkpoint: A Novel (Hardcover)

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.

13 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Makes Your Blood Boil, September 21, 2004

By	Lukas Jackson (Los Angeles, California United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Checkpoint: A Novel (Hardcover)

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.