TARGET: THE PRESIDENT

At first Nicholson Baker told his publisher he wouldn't do any interviews--he'd just let his new novel, "Checkpoint," speak for itself. But since this book is a 115-page dialogue between two characters about assassinating George W. Bush, Baker obviously needed to do some explaining, so last week he agreed to meet two states away from his home in Maine, after his wife had helped prep him. Her best question: "Are you genuinely crazy?"

One of Baker's characters, Jay--Baker calls him "the eccentric guy"--certainly is. In the grip of an impotent rage against the Iraq war, he summons his old friend Ben to a Washington hotel room, where he announces that he's plotting to kill Bush with either "radio-controlled flying saws," a boulder made of depleted uranium or self-guided homing bullets, which you put in a box along with a photograph of the person you want to shoot. (Jay now has the bullets "marinating.") By the way, Jay has also come to believe in every conspiracy theory from the notion that AIDS was a consequence of germ-warfare experiments to a Baker original: that the CIA promoted abstract painting. It becomes Ben's mission to talk him down. Sure, needless to say, a novel is a novel: "I don't actually think it would be such a hot idea for somebody to assassinate the president," Baker says. But also needless to say, that won't mollify people who think he's crossed the line.

Baker's previous outrages have mostly been against purely literary decorum. Such novels as 1988's "The Mezzanine" (about buying a pair of shoelaces) to the 1992 phone-sex dialogue "Vox" (briefly notorious because Monica Lewinsky gave a copy to Bill Clinton) have little conventional plot or character development. What makes Baker radically original is his minute obsessiveness and his willingness to entertain inappropriate subjects (such as his own envy of John Updike) and literary modes, from the sentimental ("The Everlasting Story of Nory," about the narrator's young daughter) to the pornographic ("The Fermata," whose main character takes creepy advantage of his ability to stop time). "Checkpoint" provides even fewer conventional satisfactions--anybody looking for a postmodern "Manchurian Candidate" will be really, really disappointed. But "Checkpoint" takes Baker's obsessiveness and inappropriateness into the public and political realm, and it's getting him the attention he clearly both dreads and craves.

"Checkpoint" won't be published until Aug. 10, but already Matt Drudge, Rush Limbaugh and right-wing bloggers have Baker in their cross hairs. "This is a book in the elitist literary circles," Limbaugh told his audience. "The publisher is Knopf, the same publisher of Bill Clinton's autobiography, 'My Lie' [sic]... How far does the Bush hatred have to go before every fair-minded American says, 'Enough'?" It's easy to sneer at Limbaugh for confusing a novelist with a character--would he do the same with Stephen King?--but "Checkpoint" did, in fact, originate in Baker's own fury, grief and helplessness over Iraq. "I was plodding along, writing my little books," he says, "and then suddenly this thing speared into my life and it just took me over." He lost a month of 2003 to his obsession with the news, swore off Google News and blogs--he now has a Post-It on his screen saying only e-mail--and finally wrote the first draft of "Checkpoint" in April 2004, during the siege of Fallujah, because he could think about nothing else. As he typed, he found himself weeping. "I'd never had that experience before," he says, "and I don't think this even comes through in the book. But it was as if I was mourning the war, the stupidity and the wastefulness of what we did. There was no other way to deal with this than to take on the most extreme and the most horrifying response, and see why somebody would consider that, and, ultimately, why it's wrong."

Yet Baker has what he calls "a tortured relationship" with the party-line left. During the Carter years his contrarian streak led him to work on Wall Street. "I was a neocon," he says now. "But by the time Bush One came around, I started to see that the kind of conservative I am is really so reactionary--it has to do with old trees and stuff. I am medieval in my conservatism. I'm one of those 19th-century Tories who don't believe that democracy"--he laughs--"is really the thing." And anti-Bush, pro-choice readers will be surprised when Jay begins railing against abortion: "The right wing is right on this," Baker has him say. "I'm telling you. This is murder." For Jay, abortion is no different from the deaths of Iraqi children. "We're talking about civilians," Baker explains. "We're talking about the destruction of the innocents." So do we assume Baker himself stands behind Jay's opinion? Not exactly: Baker's characters have more certainty than he does. "I don't think I should stand behind any part of the book," he says. "These are the miseries, these are the doubts that you have. I had Jay say them as forcefully as I could, because I think the left has to think about this a little more carefully. And it also seemed like, if I'm going to get myself in trouble in a book, why shouldn't I just be indiscriminately outrageous?"

Despite what you hear from critics on the right, Baker is too ambivalent and too politically unreliable to be the Michael Moore of literature. And now that he's got the book off his chest, he actually feels better about Bush. Near the end of "Checkpoint," Ben describes the president answering a question. "It looks like he's not sure how he's going to finish a sentence... his brow furrows, and then--ah!--he thinks of a word... He says it, and he flashes that childish smile of relief." Baker calls this the book's "pivotal moment." When Jay hears this, Baker says, he realizes Bush, too, "in a weird way, is an innocent. He's also a civilian." It's significant that Baker finds this moment of empathy when his bete noire is groping for a word--as if the president at his rostrum and the novelist at his keyboard were, after all, fellow sufferers. "It's hard to hate anybody you've written about," Baker says. "They always become more complicated because you've thought about them carefully." Not a slogan for a bumper sticker, but words for a writer to live by.