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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN num: 9781400079858
ISBN number: 1400079853
Label: Vintage
Manufacturer: Vintage
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 128
Printing Date: April 12, 2005
Publishing house: Vintage
Release Date: April 12, 2005
Sale Popularity Level: 543924
Studio: Vintage
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Editor's Notes and Comments:
Product Description:
From Nicholson Baker, best-selling author of Vox and the most original writer of his generation, his most controversial novel yet.
User popularity level:
Rated by buyers 
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This is a very politically motivated book where two guys get together and one has a plan to assinate the President. What transpires are the goals of both guys--one to stop his friend from his sick plan, the other to carry out his sick plan. A pretty good fast read.
Rated by buyers -
This book is billed as a novel, but it's really a short story told entirely in dialogue form -- there's a guy who's threatening to assassinate George W. Bush, and his old high-school buddy is trying to talk him out of it. The would-be assassin, Jay, seems to be delusional: I don't think we're supposed to believe that his intended plans (or weapons) could possibly work. At the same time, he's very well-informed about recent events, especially the Iraq war. I suppose that combination makes him potentially an interesting character, and the book might work as a character study -- but if that's the intention, it's too short; we don't have enough to go on to really understand this guy, and we certainly don't get anything like a thorough political assessment of the Bush Administration (or even just the Bush Administration's crimes). So I'm not sure what the book really means to provide. I like Nicholson Baker's writing, but I don't know..... maybe too little is expected of novelists these days. This isn't a bad read, but it seems dashed-off and insubstantial -- certainly not the novel that will be looked back on as defining this era.
Rated by buyers 
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I read this in 2 hours. It's a boring, short book (in script form). There's no real fowarding of the plot, and the character are annoying. Even if you hate Bush, you wont like this book.
Rated by buyers -
I think that people who try to take the political content of this book seriously are missing the point. The point of the book, like any good novel, is not in scoring political points but exploring the lives of the people involved in the novel. Because the political point of view of the two protagonists is contemporary, it's hard not to react to the political statements being made. Not surprisingly, then, many reviewers have considered the book as a political tract and have commented on how valid the political analysis is (maybe it helps to be Canadian).
But that's not the point: The point is seeing two people living in the United States in 2002/2003. While the protagonists do, occasionaly, make points that real political commentators make, they also make absolutely loony points. Like a David Mamet or Harold Pinter play, the pleasure in this book is the dialog (the book is all dialog), the characters, and their relationship.
When reading this book it might be worthwhile to take the long view: Assume that the protagonists are living in the time of Louis XIV and are considering assissinating the king. In that frame of mind, you wouldn't care about the politics and would only interested in the people. On that basis, I enjoyed the book. What is impressive to me is how much the author reveals about the characters and their values through the incidentals of the character's conversation. We see two people who really have given up on any hope of influencing their country's direction (or even the direction of their own lives) and who can not tell the difference between fact and supposition. They have come to the point where the only difference they believe that they can make in the public sphere is through some spasmodic dramatic action.
Rated by buyers -
Generally, I find the two-guys-sitting-in-a-room-talking format for works of fiction to be uninteresting. It just doesn't exercise the imagination much. Nothing really happens; there's not really a story. And in this case, I think many readers will themselves have recently engaged in conversations very similar to the one depicted here, making many of the same arguments and expressing many similar feelings. The book does score some points with me, insofsar as it might help raise certain issues from obscurity into everyday discourse (eg maybe some things about napalm in Iraq, or about the Pentagon Papers). It also works hard to depict the empathy that we sometimes know we ought to have for each other human being, but nevertheless are unable to achieve. Both characters, and Jay especially, feel the pain of certain events acutely. Imagine if we all did.
It's a very brief, quick read, most likely one sitting. Worth checking out.
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