Nicholson Baker. Checkpoint. 2004.

Wow. Okay: respect.

Guys like Nicholson Baker live in a different world: the books they write get published and appear in bookstores. It's a different artform than writing as I understand it. Does having the potential of reaching a large audience entail an added responisbility? Although this brief fiction on a plot to assassinate George W. Bush for his war crimes offers no revelations, no research, nothing an avid newspoet doesn't already know by heart and mind, it injects a conscience into the realm where conscience seems to me to be most conspicuously absent -- commercial fiction. The ugly decay of America is in our face every day and manages to be studiously ignored by mainstream American intellectuals. Random House published this? The book lacks nuance but stands in for every text by the lucky FEW: Franzens, Eggers...