The deeply unsettling "Checkpoint" (Knopf, $15.95), a slim work with a red-and-black bullseye target on the cover, takes the form of a spare, almost Socratic dialogue captured on a digital recorder between two friends, Ben and Jay. Their tension: Jay is determined to do away with the president. An appalled Ben doesn't want him to.
"Checkpoint" is something entirely different. Whether he shares the anti-Bush outrage or not (it seems pretty clear that he does), Baker manages to channel it into his extended dialogue in a manner that fumes without boiling over into something overwrought.
"I wrote 'Checkpoint' because a lot of people felt a kind of powerless, seething fury when President Bush took the country to war," the author said in a statement last month. "I wanted to capture the specificity of that rage."
"Checkpoint" is something entirely different. Whether he shares the anti-Bush outrage or not (it seems pretty clear that he does), Baker manages to channel it into his extended dialogue in a manner that fumes without boiling over into something overwrought.
"I wrote 'Checkpoint' because a lot of people felt a kind of powerless, seething fury when President Bush took the country to war," the author said in a statement last month. "I wanted to capture the specificity of that rage."
