Killing Dubya

KEN BABSTOCK

Checkpoint By Nicholson Baker Knopf, 115 pages, $22.95Nicholson Baker is a writer who's built a reputation on his near-autistic precision in prose. His voice is his eye, his eye his voice. The world's vast catalogue of ordinary things, mildly interesting gizmos, unnamable surface textures, lingering smells and peculiar facts all come wondrously alive, and not only animate, but take centre-stage in, many of his previous novels and books of non-fiction. Room Temperature, The Mezzanine, U and I and, most recently, A Box of Matches all evinced the kind of love-struck comments in books pages usually reserved for hushed retellings of carnal adventures: "I just didn't want it ever to end!" "One wishes these sorts of things could just go on and on." "It bends this way and then it bends this way."