‘Checkpoint’ sales underwhelming

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, sold fewer than 6,500 copies in its first two weeks in stores — far behind the pace of such anti-Bush best sellers as Paul Krugman’s “The Great Unraveling” and Richard Clarke’s “Against All Enemies.”

“Not every book you publish becomes a best seller,” said Paul Bogaards, executive director of publicity for Alfred A. Knopf.

“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, which had a first printing of 60,000, suffered from lack of attention. It was reviewed and debated in newspapers and in online publications and was cited by conservatives as symbolic of anti-Bush hysteria.

“How far does the Bush hatred have to go before every fair-minded American says, ‘Enough!’ ” conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh said in June when the book was first announced.

Controversy often sells, but Bogaards said negative reviews probably hurt the book. 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.

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. He 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.