This Tuesday, August 10, Nichoson Baker's novel Checkpoint will appear on bookshelves across the United States. It is a 115 page dialogue between two characters. One character is planning to assassinate George W. Bush. The second character is trying to talk him out of killing the president.
I have been trying to figure out how I feel about this book since I first heard about it on NPR a few weeks ago. I always thought that any muttering, or writing, of assassinating a president was illegal, but apparently not in the case of fiction. However, I was troubled when I read a piece about the book in this week's Newsweek, and learned that Baker wrote the book in a rage over Bush's war in Iraq. Then I read this in a Slate review of the book:
"...most of these critics haven't read the book and therefore don't know that the would-be assassin, Jay, is shown to be unhinged—a delusional paranoiac who drifts from job to job and has little feeling for his own children. Ben, the novel's other character, a comparatively sturdy Cold War historian, tries desperately to dissuade Jay and eventually succeeds. It isn't clear that Jay represents much of a threat, since his most prized weapons turn out to be 'radio-controlled flying saws,' a giant boulder made of depleted uranium ('You're going to squash the president?' Ben asks), and 'homing bullets,' which Jay programs by 'marinating' them in a box with a photograph of President Bush. The murderous rage in Checkpoint cannot and should not be mistaken for Baker's own."