Checkpoint, by Nicholson Baker

A smart bullet with Bush's name on it

Shortly after Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 steamrolled into cinemas, the US satirical magazine The Onion ran a banner headline: "Nation's Liberals Suffering from Outrage Fatigue". It's all good and well to poke fun of people tuning out for a bit, but what would happen if someone allowed political outrage to escalate out of control? Nicholson Baker explores one worst-case scenario in his latest novel, a brief but provocative little Frisbee of a tale.

As in his novel Vox, the story unfolds like a transcript. Two middle-aged men, Ben and Jay, are talking in a Washington hotel. A not entirely reformed alcoholic, Jay has summoned his friend for a chat. He gets the ball rolling with this bombshell: "I'm going to assassinate the President."

Plenty of blockbuster movies have revolved around such plots, but it's rarer in a literary novel. Don DeLillo's Libra imagined how Kennedy's assassin came to be; Thomas Mallon's Henry & Clara brought up Lincoln's assassination - but these were historical novels. Checkpoint, on the other hand, references everything from Halliburton to the Abu Ghraib prison scandal.

The title has a double meaning. On a literal level, it refers to a recent incident in Iraq, in which a family fleeing a war zone was shot at because they waved to soldiers at a security checkpoint. Two young girls were killed, and their grandfather too. He had worn a pinstripe suit in order to look more American.

Checkpoint also refers to the state of mind one reaches after prolonged exposure to moral outrage. Jay's gripes with the president are very similar to Moore's. He begins with Iraq, decrying the reported use of napalm, the deaths of more than 10,000 civilians. And then, like Moore, he snowballs this legitimate complaint into a giant catch-all of gripes, roaming from Cheney's corruption to Rumsfeld's chin to the President's smirk. This gumbo of fact and speculation will make Checkpoint a controversial book.

But questions of craft are also at stake here. Is a 113-page conversation a novel? Can a novel that is this timely actually last? The goal of Checkpoint, it seems, is to take the internal-combustion process of hatred and anger and make it visible - which Baker does brilliantly. Jay's speech begins slowly, then meanders, then turns frantic and breathless. By the conclusion, it's as if he has used up every possible molecule of oxygen in the room. Few writers have captured the texture and tenor of American speech as well as Baker.

How does Jay plan to do the deed? He has smart bullets which need simply to marinate near a photograph of the target. If that doesn't work, he will unleash a giant ball bearing and simply roll it down the hill and crush Bush. So Dubya won't have to worry about copycat crimes. On the other hand, if a few more voters feel like Jay, he might just find himself a little behind the ball come November.