Checkpoint

"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 surgeon's 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 Baker's 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"Baker's 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 Beckett's [Godot]. Baker's jokes will make people, rather than theatre majors, laugh." -Los Angeles Times"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"I confess to finding Nicholson Baker's 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-there's nobody quite like Baker in the literary universe." -Newsday"[Baker's] prose is so luminescent and so precise it manually recalibrates our brains." -Time