Baker novella could test First Amendment

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 made. But the novel is likely to be incendiary, along the lines of Michael Moore’s Bush-bashing documentary “Fahrenheit 9/11.”

Flush with the headline-generating success of Bill Clinton’s memoir “My Life,” Alfred A. Knopf is planning to publish Baker’s book Aug. 24, on the eve of the Republican National Convention. “Checkpoint” is 115 pages long and will sell for $18.

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 the logic of a 1968 Supreme Court precedent, Brandenburg vs. 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,” Taylor says. “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.”

Says Charles Bopp, a spokesman for the Secret Service: “Without seeing the work, a determination can’t be made at this time.”

Books have played roles in certain American tragedies. Timothy McVeigh handed out copies of the white supremacist manifesto “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.”

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 tells his friend, Ben, that 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 uses expletives to identify the president, and at one point 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 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.

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.”

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.

“It is not the first time a novelist has chosen fiction to express their point of view about American society or politics,” Bogaards says. “Upton Sinclair did it. So did John Steinbeck. Nick Baker does it with more nerve and fewer pages.”