"Checkpoint," Nicholson Baker's novel about the would-be assassination of President Bush by a distraught lone gunman, is a bitter, divisive book for what's turned out to be a bitter, divisive year.
Angry at the current administration, and even angrier at the war in Iraq, Baker sought to come to terms with his woes the only way he knew how: by writing a story about two old friends, one of whom is bent on committing high treason.
With anger like that you can imagine Baker himself transformed into a literary lone gunman: wild-eyed and over-caffeinated, poised at a typewriter surrounded by yellowing newspaper clippings, plotting his revenge with a red pencil clinched between his teeth.
It's not a pretty picture, and the book doesn't improve upon such a portrait. Somewhere amidst his novel's rage and catharsis, Baker becomes blinded by his own indignation and, like a cross-eyed sniper, loses sight of his original aim, promptly shooting himself in the foot.
The entirety of the slim, one-hundred and fifteen page novel, takes place in a hotel room in Washington D.C., where Jay, the aforementioned lone gunman, tells his childhood friend Ben about his plan to kill the president. Separated from his family and in financial straits, Jay has become obsessed with carrying out his scheme, a scheme that Ben does his best to discourage.
"Are you going to go off and do something absurd and permanent and horrible, and something that's going to totally unhinge the world even more than it is unhinged?" Ben pleads with his friend.
"A small, violent point would have been pressed home, that's all," Jay retorts later in one of the novel's more chilling moments. "But I also realized, of course, that I would probably be arrested and executed, or just shot, and therefore I wanted some record of what I'd done and why I did it. So I called you."
Ben, who with a family and a steady job has more to lose than Jay, suddenly finds himself implicated in the assassination plot. If he turns Jay in, he has betrayed his friend for what could have been a bluff. But if he lets Jay go, knowing his intentions, he could hang beside him.
Jay's threat is so momentous and taboo that nobody escapes unscathed. Baker uses this transference of guilt to great advantage in the novel. Because all that appears on the pages of "Checkpoint" is an unadorned transcript of Ben and Jay's conversation, there's an unsettling sensation while reading the book that the fictional exchange is in fact a real one, some long-forgotten but now unclassified wiretap dug up in dusty archives. While the bare-bones dialogue does little to enhance characters already in bad need of an extra dimension or two, the stab at authenticity does succeed in transferring the same creeping paranoia that Ben experiences onto the reader. I was ready to personally turn in my copy to Tom Ridge when I finished.
Far from using the possible assassination of a real, sitting president as some kind of gimmick to sell more books as some have accused him, Baker knows the weight his subject-matter carries, and hefts it accordingly. Yet, after doing the hard part and broaching the unbroachable, Baker has nowhere to go but in circles.
Ben eventually talks Jay out of his plan to kill W. by placating him with an effigy and a hammer (a stand-in metaphor for the novel's goal, maybe). And as it turns out, Jay's plan was more lunacy than lucidity to begin with, the assassin's weapons of choice being "radio-controlled flying saws," programmable tracking bullets, "a lump of depleted uranium" and - my favorite - a killer, brainwashed scorpion nicknamed the Manchurian Scorpion.
In between crisis and resolution we get a laundry list of atrocities from World War II to Iraq; the usual suspects like Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Karl Rove; passages on protests and urban sprawl; and finally Jay's adventures in lobster-fishing and free-range chicken farming.
While all these loose ends and conspiracy theories accurately reflect Jay's scattershot mental state, it's obvious that the intent of the book wasn't to portray a political nut pushed to the edge, but to spell out something bigger and more substantial. Whatever that original master plan was, we'll never know. Baker became too blue in the face tallying miseries to ever arrive at a point.
But things weren't always so repugnant for the author. His first novels, "The Mezzanine" (1988) and "Room Temperature" (1990), the ones that made him famous, were in love with the minutiae of life. "The Mezzanine" was about buying new shoelaces at CVS. And one of Baker's most famous essays is a one-hundred and thirty page treatise on the nuances of the word "lumber."
Controversy found him out when it was revealed that Monica Lewinsky had given a copy of Baker's novel "Vox" (1992) to Bill. "Vox" catapulted Baker unwittingly into presidential politics; "Checkpoint" finishes that climb, albeit on Baker's own terms.
The book isn't toeing anybody's party line: despite his feelings regarding Bush, Jay vociferates against Clinton and pro-choice activists; while Baker described himself in a "Newsweek" interview as "medieval in [his] conservatism." Nevertheless, "Checkpoint" has the shrill, Chicken Little tone of a Coulter or a Moore, depending on what color your state is. It kicks up a lot of sound and fury, but ends up signifying very little.
