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
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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."
“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)
Checkpoint: A Novel FROM THE CRITICS
Kirkus Reviews
From Baker (A Box of Matches, 2003, etc.), a tiny little slip of a thing about-about what? About assassinating George W. Bush? Yup. And a droll piece of work it is, at times even hilarious. A fellow named Jay, it seems, has called an old friend named Ben, saying to Ben that he must talk with him, urgently. Ben drives like mad to DC, goes to the hotel room Jay is staying in, helps Jay put a 390-minute audiotape into a tape machine, then turn it on and test it ("JAY: Testing, testing. Testing. Testing"). Once it's running, the book begins, the whole portrayed as a two-man closet drama consisting of what the tape records. A bit of small talk-the two haven't seen each other for quite a spell-and then, bingo: "JAY: I'm going to assassinate the president." ("BEN: You're shitting me, right?") Nope, no shit. At least, it seems that's the answer, since Jay even has a view of the White House-or thinks he does, that the house of the Prez is just behind a certain clump of trees-an early hint of Jay's lack of a perfect grip on reality. He's got magic bullets, he says. And little razor-sharp discs that fly through the air. And other things, including a gun. And, boy, does he have complaints. The nation's biggest employer is Wal-Mart, he declares: "Sam Walton's kids are some of the richest people in the world. The money those four have . . . [It's] enough to make you shit. It's like they're sitting in tiny rubber dinghies, floating on seas of hog waste. And it all came from those stores. Our country's dying, man! We're killing people and we're dying at the same time! I brought a hammer along." High humor, ghastly seriousness (Jay really does have a gun), and a great question, to remain unanswered here:Does he do it?An absolute treasure for anti-Bushists, the purest sin-and-snake-venom deceit and villainy to pro-Bushists. Let the reader-voter call it. Agent: Melanie Jackson/Melanie Jackson Agency
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