Checkpoint: A Novel by Nicholson Baker (English) Paperback Book

Description: Checkpoint by Nicholson Baker From the bestselling author of "Vox" and the most original writer of his generation comes his most audacious novel yet. Jay has summoned his old friend Ben to a hotel room not far from the nations capitol. During the course of an afternoon, Jay will explain exactly why and how he is planning to commit a murder that will change the course of history. FORMAT Paperback LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New Publisher Description From Nicholson Baker, best-selling author of Vox and the most original writer of his generation, his most controversial novel yet. Author Biography Nicholson Baker was born in 1957 and attended the Eastman School of Music and Haverford College. He has published six previous novels and three works of nonfiction, including Double Fold, which won a National Book Critics Circle Award in 2001. Review "A quick, stripped cry of a book. . . . As timely as fiction gets." –Lorrie Moore, New York Review of Books "Provocative . . . incendiary . . . a great work." –Rick Moody, The Believer "A meditation on action . . . [Baker] analyses the details of daily life with a surgeons precision." –The Economist "If one of our supreme chroniclers of mild manners can be roused to such patriotic indignation, democracy yet has a fighting chance." –Voice Literary Supplement "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 "Compelling . . . a passionate cry from the heart." –USA Today "What makes Baker original is his minute obsessiveness and his willingness to entertain inappropriate subjects. . . Checkpoint takes Bakers obsessiveness and inappropriateness into the public realm." –Newsweek "An astonishing, uncomfortable conversation. Baker has a real ear for the cadence and wryness of the modern intelligentsia." –Portland Oregonian "Bakers new novel checks its inhibitions at the door . . . entertaining, edgy and unpredictable." –Las Vegas City Life "Sly, slender but important . . . Baker excels at writing about those facets of the human experience we prefer to hide." –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 "On the whole, Baker improves upon Samuel Becketts [Godot]. Bakers jokes will make people, rather than theatre majors, laugh." –Los Angeles Times "Checkpoint is like a hornet: Its small, quiet, with a sinister aspect to its midday peregrinations, and it has a stinger: conscience." –Toronto Globe and Mail "I confess to finding Nicholson Bakers prose so witty and hypnotic that I never want it to stop." –Washington Post "Baker writes like no one else in America." –Newsweek "Baker [is] one of our most gifted and original writers." –Seattle Times "Enthusiast, obsessive, visionary, engineer of the everyday–theres nobody quite like Baker in the literary universe." –Newsday "[Bakers] prose is so luminescent and so precise it manually recalibrates our brains." –Time Review Quote "A quick, stripped cry of a book. . . . As timely as fiction gets." Lorrie Moore, New York Review of Books "Provocative . . . incendiary . . . a great work." Rick Moody, The Believer "A meditation on action . . . [Baker] analyses the details of daily life with a surgeons precision." The Economist "If one of our supreme chroniclers of mild manners can be roused to such patriotic indignation, democracy yet has a fighting chance." Voice Literary Supplement "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 limitsof presidential power, of law, of discourse, of rationality, and of language itself." Boston Phoenix "Compelling . . . a passionate cry from the heart." USA Today "What makes Baker original is his minute obsessiveness and his willingness to entertain inappropriate subjects. . . Checkpoint takes Bakers obsessiveness and inappropriateness into the public realm." Newsweek "An astonishing, uncomfortable conversation. Baker has a real ear for the cadence and wryness of the modern intelligentsia." Portland Oregonian "Bakers new novel checks its inhibitions at the door . . . entertaining, edgy and unpredictable." Las Vegas City Life "Sly, slender but important . . . Baker excels at writing about those facets of the human experience we prefer to hide." 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 visiblewhich Baker does brilliantly." Pittsburgh Post-Gazette "On the whole, Baker improves upon Samuel Becketts [Godot]. Bakers jokes will make people, rather than theatre majors, laugh." Los Angeles Times " Checkpoint is like a hornet: Its small, quiet, with a sinister aspect to its midday peregrinations, and it has a stinger: conscience." Toronto Globe and Mail "I confess to finding Nicholson Bakers prose so witty and hypnotic that I never want it to stop." Washington Post "Baker writes like no one else in America." Newsweek "Baker [is] one of our most gifted and original writers." Seattle Times "Enthusiast, obsessive, visionary, engineer of the everydaytheres nobody quite like Baker in the literary universe." Newsday "[Bakers] prose is so luminescent and so precise it manually recalibrates our brains." Time From the Trade Paperback edition. Excerpt from Book May 2004Adele Hotel and SuitesWashington, D.C. jay: Testing, testing. Testing. Testing.ben: Is it workingjay: I think so. [ Click...click, click. ] Yes, see the little readout? Whered you get itben: Circuit City.jay: Three hundred and ninety minutes. That should definitely do it. Ill pay you back.ben: No, its 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 glassesben: Yeah, Julie helped me pick them. Did you know Brooks Brothers made glasses framesjay: No, I did not. Let me see them.ben: Sure.jay: "Made in China." I always check. Anyway, they suit you. Really, you look less like a bird.ben: Im glad to hear it. So tell me whats up.jay: Oh, lets see. Where to begin? Where to beginben: Obviously you have something on your mind.jay: Thats true.ben: You could begin with that.jay: Okay. Uh, Im going to--okay, Ill just say it. Um.ben: What is itjay: Im going to assassinate the president.ben: What do you meanjay: Take his life.ben: Youre shitting me, rightjay: No.ben: Tell me this is one of your little flippancies.jay: Its not a flippancy.ben: Come on, Jay. This isnt--turn that off.jay: No, Id like it on. Before I do it I want to explain, for the record.ben: Please turn that off right now.jay: Its got to stay on.ben: I think I better go.jay: Alreadyben: Yes already. Youre talking about the president, am I right? That is what you said. Or did I just hallucinatejay: No, that is what I said. But you cant go.ben: This isnt what I thought you were calling me about. I thought maybe your girlfriend had left you.jay: She did.ben: Well, okay. Thats more like it.jay: But I also have this plan that I need to execute. Calm down, will youben: Thats pretty funny.jay: Whatben: Youre telling me to calm down when youve got this...deed on your mind. Its a major, major, major crime. It doesnt get much more major.jay: I know, and its high time, too. I havent felt this way about any of the other ones. Not Nixon, not Bonzo, even. For the good of humankind.ben: Do you have a gunjay: I dont like guns.ben: But do you have onejay: I may.ben: That is so low. Youre a civilized person.jay: Not anymore.ben: You cant--the country has no need for this service.jay: I think it does. I think we have to lance the fucking boil.ben: No, Im serious, hell be out of power eventually. Either he loses and hes out, or he wins, and then hes out a little later. Either way, his time will pass in a twinkling. Many years from now youll be reading the comics in some cafe somewhere, and youll think, Boy oh boy, Im sure glad I didnt do that.jay: Im going to do it today.ben: Lets just set it aside, shall we? Just put that off to one side. You know youll never get away with it. Theyll shoot you full of bullets and youll die. Or theyll fry you. Seriously, youll die. And for what? Do you know what a bullet doesjay: 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: Thats what happened to McKinley.ben: You mean President McKinleyjay: Yes.ben: Well, right. Do you want that to happen to you? They have snipers up on the roof.jay: I know, Ive seen them. Theyve got missile launchers up there, too.ben: Those guys want to put bullets into you.jay: They dont know about me.ben: Oh, but they know that there are bad people out there.jay: Thats true, and Im one of them.ben: I dont think so.jay: No, Ben, this guy is beyond the beyond. What hes done with this war. The murder of the innocent. And now the prisons. Its too much. It makes me so angry. And its 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 rememberben: Im 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 cant.ben: Its all right.jay: Im 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 attac plans? And the hopheads who flew the airplanesjay: Hey hey, ho ho--George Bush has got to go. ben: Look, hes going to go, its inevitable, hell 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 tojay: Oh, Ive had a bunch of jobs. I got into a slight financial scrape.ben: How badjay: Well, I nearly had to declare personal--insolvency, shall we say.ben: Ouch.jay: It was intense.ben: I bet.jay: So Ive been working as a day laborer.ben: You havent been teaching at alljay: 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 mental time.ben: Mm.jay: Your body is working and your brain can kind of cruise here and there.ben: Yeah, I find in the evenings, like when Im chopping up a cucumber to make salad, that rhythmic chop , chop , chop , sometimes I think of a little connection that didnt 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 dont 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 Wisconsin, and I spent some time there, thats where som of the papers are, and, well, the material hasnt started to sing to me yet. But it will, it will.jay: When did we last get together? Was that three years agoben: May have been. Long time.jay: Im so sorry about that wheelbarrow, man.ben: No no no.jay: I felt bad, I just didnt see it in the dark.ben: Its fine, it still works. It lists a little, thats all.jay: Really sorry. So what have you been working on insteadben: Instead of whatjay: Instead of the book about the steaming open of the envelopes.ben: Oh, a few things--a few Cold War themes that Ive been pursuing. And my classes take up time--I co-teach an honors seminar every spring.jay: Some good studentsben: A few. Oh, and I bought a camera! Thats my big news.jay: A camera, huh? Digitalben: Well, I have a digital camera, but no, this one that I bought is a film camera. Its called a Bronica--a Bronica GS-1.jay: A Bronica GS-1. Whats thatben: Its a big heavy camera, it uses a wider kind of film.jay: Wheres it made? Germanyben: No, no, Japan.jay: Oh, of course. And its heavy, is itben: Yeah, but the great thing is, you dont have to use a tripod. You can hold it with a handle called a speed grip. I love it.jay: It sounds very professional.ben: Oh, its definitely professional--I mean, Im just an amateur, but its a privilege to hold this thing. I bought a couple of lenses for it, a beautiful hundred-and-ten-millimeter macro lens, butter smooth. Im really into lenses now.jay: Remember that photograph of the girl, the girl runningben: What girljay: The girl in Vietnam running from the napalm? Shes naked, shes crying.ben: Oh, yeah, yeah.jay: Well, theyve used napalm in Iraq.ben: I may have heard something about that.jay: Right off the bat they used it. At first they denied it. It came out in a newspaper. Napalm bombs. And some PR guy from the Pentagon wrote an outraged response. "We did NOT use napalm, we got rid of our stocks of napalm years ago, this is a GROSS INACCURACY and a DISSERVICE TO YOUR READERS," and so on and so on. Well, then, of course, it turns out that, well, uh, yes, theyre shooting missile full of this goop that starts intense fires and, well, yes, theyre using it to burn people alive, and, uh, yes, all our Army commanders do call it napalm, but it isnt technically napalm because its not naphtha-poly-toly-moly-doodlemate , whatever. Whatever the formula was when they first invented it back behind the stadium.ben: The stadium.jay: The Harvard stadium. Thats where they invented it. So this is a different chemical formula, but the people who shoot the missiles call it napalm, the generals call it napalm, because hey, its exploding globs of fiery jelly that cause an agonizing death. In fact, its improved fire jelly--its even harder to put out than the stuff they used in Vietnam. And Korea. And Germany. And Japan. It just has another official name. Now its called Mark 77. I mean, have we learned nothing? Mark 77! Im going to kill that bastard. Details ISBN1400079853 Author Nicholson Baker Short Title CHECKPOINT Language English ISBN-10 1400079853 ISBN-13 9781400079858 Media Book Format Paperback DEWEY FIC Year 2005 Residence ME, US Birth 1957 Subtitle A Novel DOI 10.1604/9781400079858 Country of Publication United States AU Release Date 2005-04-12 NZ Release Date 2005-04-12 US Release Date 2005-04-12 UK Release Date 2005-04-12 Place of Publication New York Pages 128 Publisher Random House USA Inc Series Vintage Contemporaries Publication Date 2005-04-12 Imprint Vintage Books Audience General We've got this At The Nile, if you're looking for it, we've got it. With fast shipping, low prices, friendly service and well over a million items - you're bound to find what you want, at a price you'll love! TheNile_Item_ID:9955226;

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