Checkpoint

by Nicholson Baker

Book Overview

From Nicholson Baker, best-selling author of Vox and the most original writer of his generation, his most controversial novel yet. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1400044006
• ISBN13: 9781400044009
• Release Date: August 2004
• Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
• Length: 115 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.2" x 7.6"

Customer Reviews

Excellent!

Everything was smooth and perfect! Condition is excellent, just like new, but about 99% off a regular price! Couldn't have asked for anything better! Shipping was as expedient and it only has a library lamination, and property sticker, but it keeps the book in better condition. I would recommend the seller to everyone!

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.

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.

A Socratic Dialogue for Our Time

This wonderful, biting, cathartic little book should be read and reread by everyone who is in some despair over current political life in the U.S. It is likely to become as famous as Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal. Written entirely in dialogue, it would do equally well as a radio play except that no radio station would air it without significant bleeps. I hope, however, that two good actors (say, Robin Williams and Billy Crystal) will record it on CDs.

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.