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Checkpoint
by Nicholson Baker Rating: • (Read only
if your interest is strong) |
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Chilling Nicholson
Baker presents a controversial novel with his new book, Checkpoint.
Structured as a dialogue between two old friends, Jay and Ben, there’s a coldness to their discussion of Jay’s plan to
assassinate the President. Beyond structure, the setting is a hotel room, and
Jay has set up a videotape to record their conversation. Both add to the
coldness. Here’s an excerpt from the beginning, pp. 3-9: May 2004 JAY: Testing,
testing. Testing, testing BEN: Is
it working? JAY: I
think so. [Click … click,click.] Yes, see the little readout? Where’d
you get it? BEN: JAY: Three
hundred and ninety minutes. That should definitely do it. I’ll pay you back. BEN: No,
it’s fine, honestly. JAY: Well,
thanks, man. I just feel I have a lot in my noggin right now. BEN: So
I gather. You look good, Jay. JAY: Really?
I was working on a fishing boat for a while, dropped some pounds. Are those
new glasses? BEN: Yeah,
Julie helped me pick them. Did you know Brooks Brothers made glasses frames? JAY: No,
I did not. Let me see them. BEN: Sure. JAY: “Made in BEN: I’m
glad to hear it. So tell me what’s up. JAY: Oh, let’s see. Where to begin? Where to
begin? BEN: Obviously
you have something on your mind. JAY: That’s true. BEN: You
could begin with that. JAY: Okay. Uh, I’m going to—okay, I’ll just say
it. Um. BEN: ‘What
is it? JAY: I’m going to assassinate the president. BEN: What
do you mean? JAY: Take
his life. BEN: You’re
shitting me, right? JAY: No. BEN: Tell
me this is one of your little flippancies. JAY: It’s not a flippancy. BEN: Come
on, Jay. This isn’t—turn that off. JAY: No, I’d like it on. Before I do it I want
to explain, for the record. BEN: Please
turn that off right now. JAY: It’s got to stay on. BEN: I
think I better go. JAY: Already? BEN: Yes
already. You’re talking about the president, am I right? That is what you
said. Or did I just hallucinate? JAY: No, that is what I said. But you can’t
go. BEN: This
isn’t what I thought you were calling me about. I thought maybe your
girlfriend had left you. JAY: She did. BEN: Well,
okay. That’s more like it. JAY: But I also have this plan that I need
to execute. Calm down, will you? BEN: That’s
pretty funny. JAY: What? BEN: Telling me to calm down when you’ve got
this … deed on your mind. It’s a major, majorcrime.
It doesn’t get much more major. JAY: I know, and it’s high time, too. I
haven’t felt this way about any of the other ones. Not Nixon, not Bonzo, even. For the good of humankind. BEN: Do
you have a gun? JAY: I don’t like guns. BEN: But
do you have one? JAY: I may. BEN: That
is so low. You’re a civilized person. JAY: Not anymore. BEN: You
can’t—the country has no need for this service. JAY: I think it does. I think we have to
lance the fucking boil. BEN: No,
I’m serious, he’ll be out of power eventually.
Either he loses and he’s out, or he wins, and then he’s out a little later.
Either way, his time will pass in a twinkling. Many years from now you’ll be
reading the comics in some café somewhere, and you’ll think, Boy oh boy, I’m
sure glad I didn’t do that. JAY: I’m going to do it today. BEN: Let’s
just set it aside, shall we? Just put that off to one side. You know you’ll
never get away with it. They’ll shoot you full of bullets and you’ll die. Or
they’ll fry you. Seriously, you’ll die. And for what? Do you know what a
bullet does? JAY: It tears into your flesh at high speed.
It rips through your vitals. BEN: If
you get hit here? Half-digested material leaks out of your intestines into
your abdominal cavity. JAY: That’s what happened to McKinley. BEN: You mean President McKinley? JAY: Yes. BEN: Well,
right. Do you want that to happen to you? They have snipers up on the roof. JAY: I
know, I’ve seen them.
They’ve got missile launchers up there, too. BEN: Those
guys want to put bullets into you. JAY: They don’t know about me. BEN: Oh,
but they know that there are bad people out there. JAY: That’s true, and I’m one of them. BEN: I
don’t think so. JAY: No, Ben, this guy is beyond the beyond.
What he’s done with this war. The murder of the innocent. And now the
prisons. It’s too much. It makes me so angry. And it’s a new kind of anger,
too. There was a story a year ago, April last year. It was a family at a
checkpoint. Do you remember? BEN: I’m
not sure. JAY: It
was a family fleeing in a car. The mother was one of the few survivors. And
she said “I saw—” Sorry. I can’t. BEN: It’s all right. JAY: I’m not going to let him get away with
this. BEN: You think this is all him? What about,
you know, Cheney? What about Donald? What about all the generals who came up
with the attack plans? And the hopheads who flew the airplanes? JAY: Hey hey, ho ho—George Bush has got to go. BEN: Look,
he’s going to go, it’s inevitable, he’ll have a successor. JAY: Now. He has to go now. BEN: Set
it aside. Just set it off to one side, please, will you? What have you been
up to? JAY: Oh, I’ve had a bunch of jobs. I got
into a slight financial scrape. BEN: How
bad? JAY: Well, I nearly had to declare personal—
insolvency, shall we say. BEN: Ouch. JAY: It was intense. BEN: I
bet. JAY: So I’ve been working as a day laborer. BEN: You
haven’t been teaching at all? JAY: That kind of ended. It was really a
part-time thing, anyway, so... But the day labor has been really good for me.
When you do gruntwork for hours and hours you
actually have a lot of JAY: Your body is working and your brain can kind of cruise here and there. BEN: Yeah,
I find in the evenings, like when I’m chopping up a cucumber to make salad,
that rhythmic chop, chop, chop, sometimes I think of a little
connection that didn’t occur to me all day. JAY: So tell me how your book is coming. BEN: Which
one? You mean the one— JAY: The one about the government department
during the war, the department that steamed open the envelopes. BEN: Oh,
the Office of Censorship, right. Well, I kind of hit a retaining wall with
that one. But we don’t need to talk about that. JAY: I want to. It sounded very interesting
when you told me about it. BEN: Well,
okay, I spent some time at the National Archives and then I went to JAY: When did we last get together? Was that
three years ago? BEN: May have been. Long time. Many
readers won’t care for the subject matter or the sparseness of Checkpoint.
It was the controversy about the book that caught my attention, and that’s
why I read it. Unless you share my curiosity about what was so controversial,
I recommend that you take a pass. Steve
Hopkins, October 25, 2004 |
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ã 2004 Hopkins and Company, LLC The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the November 2004
issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/Checkpoint.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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