Sales poor for best-selling author's anti-Bush novel

NEW YORK -- Yes, there are limits to what George Bush haters will read. "Checkpoint," the controversial Nicholson Baker novel about a man who wants to kill the president, has sold fewer than 6,500 copies since coming out two weeks ago, the book's publisher said.

"Not every book you publish becomes a best seller," said Paul Bogaards, executive director of publicity for Alfred A. Knopf. Bogaards said sales for the book, which had a first printing of 60,000, were far behind the pace of such anti-Bush best sellers as Paul Krugman's "The Great Unraveling" and Richard Clarke's "Against All Enemies."

"Checkpoint," by the author of the best-selling "Vox," imagines a conversation between two old high school friends. One of them is so angry about the war in Iraq that he talks of assassinating Bush. His friend tries to talks him out of it.

No one could say the book suffered from lack of attention. It was reviewed and debated both in newspapers and in online publications and was cited by conservatives as symbolic of anti-Bush hysteria.

Controversy often sells, but Bogaards said some of the attention probably hurt the book, as he cited a wave of negative reviews. The New York Times called it "another discouraging document of this age of wild talk," while a critic for the San Jose Mercury News confided to falling asleep twice while reading it. Bogaards also acknowledged that Baker may have hurt his own book by giving only a handful of interviews.

"More is always helpful," Bogaards said. "You need to take your case to the American public and let the people decide."

As of Friday, the novel ranked just 1,250 on Amazon.com, and only nine reader reviews had been posted, indicating that readers were far less interested in the book than the media was. Politics & Prose, an independent bookstore in Washington, D.C., said Friday it had sold just four copies.

"He's been a popular author for us in the past, and we ordered heavily for this book, but the reviews have been and it hasn't done very well," said Barbara Meade, a co-owner of the store.

Baker is known for such unorthodox narratives as "Vox," which consists entirely of an erotic phone conversation, and "The Mezzanine," set mostly on an office escalator. Baker also wrote the nonfiction "Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper," a National Book Critics Circle prize winner in 2002.

"Vox" has its own political history. It was mentioned in the Starr Report as a book given to President Clinton by Monica Lewinsky, the White House intern with whom Clinton had an affair.