After the recent flurry of damning political memoirs, not to mention Michael Moore's box-office busting documentaryFahrenheit 9/11, the Bush administration might feel it has been dumped on quite enough for one election season.

But the worst may be yet to come, in the unlikeliest of forms: a slim volume of fiction from the ordinarily mild-mannered minimalist Nicholson Baker.

Mr Baker's new novel, Checkpoint, features two characters who spend much of its 115 pages discussing how to assassinate President George Bush. They don't actually do the deed, or even attempt it, but the book is - according to early snippets - replete with deep-seated anger and elegantly nasty epithets hurled at both the President and his cabinet.

Mr Baker's publisher, Alfred Knopf, plans to release the book on 24 August, on the eve of the Republican National Convention in New York. To call it a provocation would be an understatement. The author and publishers have no intention of giving anybody ideas - to do so would be a criminal offence - but they are certainly playing very close to the edge in a United States that, in the wake of the 11 September attacks, has shown no compunction about locking people up and asking questions later, free speech rights be damned.

There was no immediate official reaction yesterday after extracts from Checkpoint were published in The Washington Post. A spokesman for the Secret Service, the uniformed outfit charged with protecting the President and other officials, told the Post merely that "without seeing the work, a determination can't be made at this time".

Likewise, it is impossible to tell whether Mr Baker's book will become a lightning rod for the competing political passions that have divided the country, particularly over the war in Iraq and its aftermath. Unlike Michael Moore, he has never laid claim to a populist mantle or sought to attract attention to himself through overt rabble-rousing.

(...)

Checkpoint, though, is clearly something else. According to the Post's account, its two protagonists, Ben and Jay, talk down and dirty about the Bush administration into a tape recorder during an in-room lunch at a Washington hotel. Jay announces he's going to assassinate the President, and the men proceed to talk about both why and how he might do such a thing.

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Jay says he hasn't felt so much hostility against any other president - not Nixon, not Reagan. Jay says of Mr Bush: "He is beyond the beyond. What he's done with this war. The murder of the innocent. And now the prisons. It's too much. It makes me so angry. And it's a new kind of anger, too." At one point, he calls Mr Bush an "unelected [expletive] drunken OILMAN" who is "squatting" in the White House and "muttering over his prayer book every morning." At another point, he calls Mr Bush "one dead armadillo".

Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld are described as "rusted hulks" and "zombies" who have "fought their way back up out of the peat bogs where they've been lying, and they're stumbling around with grubs scurrying in and out of their noses and they're going, 'We - are - your - advisors.'"