I came across this review, on Salon.com, of Nicholson Baker's new book, Checkpoint, in which a character contemplates killing Bush, something I think a few liberals I know have contemplated themsleves. Taylor's criticism is searing and to the point-Baker didn't have the balls to take it all the way and treat it satirically (it's a long, but interesting article, but if you want to read it all click here).
"Checkpoint" by Nicholson Baker
This hot-button novel isn't bad because it's about a plot to kill Bush. It's bad because it can't face the real, justifiable rage that can drive rational people to think the unthinkable.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Charles Taylor
Aug. 16, 2004 ?|? "The vanity of George W. stands out with every smirk. He literally cannot control that vanity. It seeps out of every movement of his lips, it squeezes through every tightlipped grimace. Every grin is a study in smugsmanship."
-- Norman Mailer, New York magazine (2004)
"There are people who think of Johnny as a clown and a buffoon, but I do not."
-- John McGiver, as Sen. Thomas Jordan, in "The Manchurian Candidate" (1962)
Nicholson Baker's short novel "Checkpoint" does not, as advance buzz has suggested, advocate the assassination of George W. Bush. It would have been a more interesting book if it had.
"Checkpoint" is written as a dialogue between Jay, who is holed up in a Washington, D.C., hotel room and determined to assassinate Bush, and Ben, the friend he has summoned to hear his plans. Baker is trying to get at the way in which otherwise decent people can be deranged by an overwhelming sense of hopelessness. He is trying to capture the desperation and fear that people are feeling at the prospect of four more years of Bush. Despite Baker's skittish retreat from his premise, he manages to suggest a few vital questions: When does political protest become simply a way of putting up with the status quo? When should protest be abandoned in favor of direct action?
Baker has set up his dialogue as a debate between the id and the superego of anti-Bush feeling. Jay, the id, thinks all the opinion pieces have been written and Bush is so evil he needs to be killed "for the good of humankind." Ben, the superego, is a gentle NPR sort of liberal who believes that violence only leads to more violence and that Jay's act will "unhinge the world even more than it is unhinged."
In other words, in "Checkpoint" Baker has divided the left between a madman and a wimp. That might have worked if Baker had a taste for satirical blood. But Baker is too mild a writer to get his hands dirty in that way. That mildness is part of what's always been charming about Baker -- the weird attention to sensory phenomena, to ephemera. Baker was accused of a crass ploy to attract attention when he wrote the sexual fantasies "Vox" and "The Fermata." But with them, he produced two of most joyous, absolutely guilt-free books ever written about sex. And he couldn't have pulled that off if he seemed threatening. But Baker's eccentricities, the friendliness that allowed him to write so invitingly of sexual fantasies, is exactly what makes him inadequate to write about a moment when the political stakes are so dire.
There has been no other period in my life -- not during Watergate, not during Iran-Contra or the rest of the Reagan administration -- when picking up a morning newspaper seemed like such an invitation to begin your day in a state of crippling rage. The wish to know the worst has to fight it out daily with the desire to get through the day, to work, to spend time with your loved ones, to experience pleasure. There are people I know, not silly or shallow people or people easily given to anger, who cannot look at George W. Bush without simmering with rage. There are Americans who consider it part of their duty as citizens to pay attention to what the president says who have not been able to watch a Bush speech or State of the Union address.
For "Checkpoint" to have any teeth, Bush's prospective assassin would have to be one of those decent, reasonable, grounded people. And he would have to be allowed to make his case for killing Bush with an inexorable Swiftian logic.
But Baker is neither bloody-minded nor despairing nor serious enough to give us a good person brought to such a point. He hedges his bet by making Jay unbalanced to begin with. There is a reference to a past mental breakdown ("the bad time," Ben calls it) and there are stories of a checkered employment history, ruptured personal relationships, a general sense of drifting. They add up to a safety exit for Baker, a means of saying, "I put all these fantasies of killing Bush in the mouth of somebody who's not playing with a full deck."
What is the point of imagining such a premise if you defuse it before you begin? There is something cowardly about Baker's conception of his would-be assassin, an addled screw-up with fantasies of radar bullets and radio-controlled buzz saws that would fly to their targets. If anyone is looking for the real insult to George W. Bush in this book, it's not that an American writer has created a character bent (halfheartedly, it must be said) on killing him -- but that the writer cannot even take the prospect of Bush's murder that seriously. And that is also an insult to those of us who, as Janet Malcolm recently wrote in a letter to the New York Times, "are scared of what another four years of his administration will do to this country and to the world." ...
Recent Comments