From Booklist
Jay and Ben are old friends who haven't seen each other in a few years. A former teacher who has fallen on hard times, Jay is very, very upset about the war in Iraq. He has expressed his objections by marching in an antiwar demonstration in the nation's capital, but the protest has had no effect. Now Jay has asked Ben, a writer currently working on a book about the cold war, to bring a tape recorder to a Washington, D.C., hotel room because Jay wants to talk about his decision to assassinate the president. Nervous and incredulous, Ben anxiously debates with his keyed-up buddy. He is also deeply distressed by the atrocities in Iraq and the immoral covert actions of Bush and Cheney and their cohorts, but he knows that murder is not the answer. Once again the chimerical and fearless Baker has written a work of provocative and razor-sharp fiction, this time crafting a nail-biting duet for two voices under duress that incisively charts the emotional turmoil generated by the horrors and conundrums of war, terrorism, dirty politics, and repression. Place this beside Barry Lopez's searing short-story collection
Resistance [BKL My 1 04] and Philip Roth's towering novel
The Plot against America [BKL Ag 04], and you have a triptych of lacerating works of the imagination that insightfully and cathartically confront the urgent issues of the day.
Donna SeamanCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
"Compelling . . . a passionate cry from the heart." --USA Today
“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
"Sly, slender but important . . . Baker excels at writing about those facets of the human experience we prefer to hide." --David Kipen, 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
"Baker's new novel checks its inhibitions at the door . . . entertaining, edgy and unpredictable." --Las Vegas City Life
“If one of our supreme chroniclers of mild manners can be roused to such patriotic indignation, democracy yet has a fighting chance.” --
LA Weekly
"On the whole, Baker improves upon Samuel Beckett's [Godot]. Baker's jokes will make people, rather than theatre majors, laugh." --P. J. O'Rourke,
Los Angeles Times
"An astonishing, uncomfortable conversation. Baker has a real ear for the cadence and wryness of the modern intelligentsia."
--Portland Oregonian
“
Checkpoint is like a hornet: It’s small, quiet, with a sinister aspect to its midday peregrinations, and it has a stinger: conscience.” --
Toronto Globe and Mail
"High humor, ghastly seriousness." Kirkus (starred review)
