By Linton Weeks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, June 29, 2004; Page C01

In Nicholson Baker’s new novella, “Checkpoint,” a man sits in a Washington
hotel room with a friend and talks about assassinating President Bush.
     It’s a work of the imagination and no attempts
on the president’s life are actually made, but the novel is likely to
be incendiary, as with Michael Moore’s documentary, “Fahrenheit 9/11.”
      Flush with the headline-generating success of
“My Life,” by Bill Clinton, Alfred A. Knopf is planning to publish Baker’s
work Aug. 24, on the eve of the Republican National Convention. “Checkpoint”
is 115 pages long and will sell for $18.
     In the book, two men — Ben and Jay — meet at
the fictional Adele Hotel and Suites in Washington. It is midday. They
eat a bag of bagel chips and order lunch from room service. They talk
into a tape recorder.

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.

Though it is against the law to threaten the president in real life,
a work of fiction is usually protected by the First Amendment.
     “Under a big 1968 Supreme Court precedent, Brandenburg
v. Ohio, speaking of assassinating the president cannot be forbidden
or punished unless the speaker’s purpose is to provoke an assassination
attempt and that is likely to be the effect,” says legal scholar Stuart
Taylor Jr. of the National Journal. “It’s quite possible in the wake of
more recent developments — 9/11 especially — the court might modify that
in some kinds of cases. But it’s almost inconceivable that the court would
allow punishment of a novelist for what one of his characters says about
killing the president.”
    “Without seeing the work,” says Charles Bopp, a spokesman
for the Secret Service, “a determination can’t be made at this time.”
   Books have played roles in certain American tragedies.
Timothy McVeigh handed out copies of “The Turner Diaries” before the Oklahoma
City bombing. John Hinckley Jr., would-be assassin of Ronald Reagan, and
Mark David Chapman, who killed John Lennon, both carried copies of “The
Catcher in the Rye.” James Edward Perry followed 22 of the recommendations
in “Hit Man: A Technical Manual for Independent Contractors” in the 1993
Silver Spring contract killings of Mildred Horn, her quadriplegic son, Trevor,
and Trevor’s nurse, Janice Saunders, according to prosecutors.
     Baker’s fiction is written like a script for
a two-man play. It is satirical at some points, serious at others. There
are fanciful flourishes and fierce, furious fits of anger.
    The critically admired Baker is a master of written-from-a-weird-angle
fiction. His novel “Vox” was basically a phone-sex conversation. And
“The Mezzanine” is a 135-page meditation on an escalator ride.
    In “Checkpoint,” the main character, Jay, rants and
rages against Bush. He says he hasn’t felt so much hostility against any
other president — not Nixon, not Reagan.
    Of Bush, Jay says: “He 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.”
    He is outraged that the United States armed forces
have used napalm-like bombs in Iraq. He says: “It’s improved fire jelly
— it’s 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 it’s
called Mark 77. I mean, have we learned nothing? Mark 77! I’m going to kill
that bastard.”
   He uses expletives to identify the president. At one
point he says, “He’s one dead armadillo.”
    Much of the book is serious polemic, based on Baker’s
reporting. The title, “Checkpoint,” comes from a story that Jay read in
the Sydney Morning Herald about a Shiite family of 17 that was seeking safe
haven in southern Iraq in 2003. At a checkpoint south of Karbala, U.S.
forces opened fire on the family’s Land Rover. Several family members died;
two young girls were decapitated by the gunfire. Jay chokes up when recounting
the story to Ben.
    Some of the ways Jay envisions killing the president
are ludicrous. One is radio-controlled flying saws that “look like little
CDs but they’re ultrasharp and they’re totally deadly, really nasty.”
     Another is a remote-controlled boulder made of
depleted uranium.
   “You’re going to squash the president?” Ben asks Jay.
    But Jay also has a gun and some bullets. And Ben realizes
at one point that even if Jay is crazy, he is still talking about killing
a sitting president. “If the FBI and the Secret Service . . . come after
me because I’ve been hanging out with you in a hotel room before you make
some crazy attempt on the life of the president, I’m totally cooked,” Ben
says. “Yes, you were talking a lot of delusional gobbledygook about homing
bullets, but basically your intent was clear. I’ll have to say that. I’m
scared.”
    Jay calls Bush an “unelected [expletive] drunken OILMAN”
who is “squatting” in the White House and “muttering over his prayer
book every morning.”
    He calls Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld “rusted hulks” and “zombies” who have “fought their way
back up out of the peat bogs where they’ve been lying, and they’re stumbling
around with grubs scurrying in and out of their noses and they’re going,
‘We — are — your — advisers.’ “
    Cheney, Jay says, is “hunched, man, the corruption
has completely hunched and gnarled him. His mouth is pulled totally over
on one side of his face.”
    The novel, says Knopf spokesman Paul Bogaards, “is
a portrait of an anguished protagonist pushed to extremes. Baker is using
the framework and story structure as a narrative device to express the
discontent many in America are feeling right now.”
    Bogaards says: “It is not
the first time a novelist has chosen fiction to express their point of
view about American society or politics. Upton Sinclair did it. So did
John Steinbeck. Nick Baker does it with more nerve and fewer pages.”