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The unctuous young woman conducting the interview fawns over the poet, lavishing compliments and pressing for the personal details that nursed his genius. “I’ve always been drawn to the masters of the everyday realm,” Buford explains. “That goes back to some of the early Japanese
practitioners of the haiku, who found solace in the quotidian life beneath the capricious hands of fate. And then all the way up through the plain-speakers of modern times, Robert Frost, Gwendolyn Brooks, Billy Collins.”
The BEZ interviewer says breathlessly, “One of the fascinating things about this collection, if you don’t mind my saying so, is that here you are, an African-American man from the South Side, this repository of black life and culture, and, really, there’s very little that relates specifically to the African-American experience in any of your poems. Would you care to comment on that?”
“See,” says Buford, “with the leaps in education, in mobility, and of course, with the advent of the Internet providing the democratization of information, we as a country are moving beyond simple classifications. Our common experience today is without hyphens, just American.”
When the young woman asks Buford to read from Still Life, Lincoln discovers that Buford has amped up his presentation since the disastrous poetry slam. Now the poet declaims with the exaggerated excitement and wonder of a kindergarten teacher trying to interest a squirming class. After a minute or so, Lincoln turns off the radio in the middle of a poem about radishes. With Buford’s voice still looping inside his skull, Lincoln hurries to dress and get onto his bike. He spends the whole day pedaling along the lakeshore, doing all he can to wear himself down to an exhausted nub.
That evening Lincoln stretches out on his sofa to soothe his aching muscles. Sipping vodka, he drifts through the day’s Tribune. Several years ago, the paper moved the truncated books section to Saturday, and Lincoln sees that there’s a page devoted to online publishing, just as Flam mentioned a few months ago. Glancing over the columns, Lincoln stops short and takes a slug of vodka. The Tribune has reviewed The Ultimate Position.
He recognizes the byline: Alden Fieldstone, an English professor at Beloit College.
The professor begins by worrying that online and digital publishing is too easy—too many careless books are being produced. “A good case in point is The Ultimate Position, a bildungsroman cum thriller cum sociological treatise cum sex manual written by a Chicagoan, Alice Upshaw.” Fieldstone proceeds to obliterate the book, calling it “banal” and “tedious,” crammed with “internal monologues that sound like Samantha from Sex and the City babbling to herself on the way home, alone, in a taxi after she’s drunk too much and failed to pick up a man.” Fieldstone concludes:
Ms. Upshaw has glommed together the beginnings of some fresh ideas about women’s sexual exploration in the postfeminist era; she shows flashes of inventive language. None of her budding talent mattered, however. I suspect that it was too simple to publish the manuscript without a serious editor adding the slow layering of thought provided by the old-style book business. On my optimistic days, I hope that the new world of publishing will come to appreciate the value of strong editing. But for now, I fear we will be saddled with more techno-facilitated books like The Ultimate Position, which in its carelessness proves to be badly misnamed—The Awkward Position would be more like it.
Lincoln looks up. He has trouble focusing his eyes, and he hears a low buzzing in his ears. He feels as if he’s been pummeled, although there’s no overt pain.
He lies that way for more than an hour, getting up only once, to replenish his glass of vodka. His cell phone rings at about ten.
“Have you read it?” Amy asks.
“An hour ago.”
“Just an hour ago?”
“It’s been a long day. I was out.”
“Well, what do you think?”
Lincoln knows he has to play this carefully. He can’t read her voice—is she devastated? Furious? He says weakly, “Actually, there are a couple of phrases we could cull from here for an ad: ‘fresh ideas about women’s sexual exploration;’ ‘inventive language.’ ”
“John, that’s one of the worst reviews I’ve ever seen,” Amy cries, but she’s laughing.
“Yeah, you’re right, it is pretty bad.”
“Thank god my name isn’t on it.” Another laugh.
“Yeah, you lucked out.”
“And the Tribune doesn’t usually run critical reviews.”
“No, not very often.”
“Aren’t you friends with the editor of the book review? Isn’t he your best friend?”
Lincoln lets go of a deep breath. He knows how easy it would be for suspicions to start swirling in Amy’s mind, conspiracy theories. “It doesn’t work like that,” he explains. “The editor can assign the book, but he’s pretty much got to take what comes in. Flam can’t just impose his opinions.” He pauses. “Besides, he’s been away for a couple of weeks.”
Yes, Flam has been away, but in bits of Professor Fieldstone’s observations, Lincoln detects echoes of his friend. Is Flam trying to tell him something?
“Well, I’m really glad I made you keep my name off the book,” Amy repeats. “Poor Alice Upshaw! If she were around, she’d be humiliated.”
“The pathetic irony,” Lincoln continues, “is that the book got huge editorial help—at least as much as I ever gave a book in print. Probably more.”
“That’s not ironic,” Amy corrects him before hanging up. “That’s just fucked.”
Lincoln, too, is glad that his name isn’t on The Ultimate Position, but he worries that his colleagues at iAgatha may see the review and wonder about the quality of editorial advice he is being paid to hand out. No problem. The iAgatha principals don’t read newspapers, and the books they publish are so obscure that no one has bothered to set up a Google alert on the titles. The review passes unnoticed, with no impact on sales. So much for the adage that any kind of publicity is good publicity. Like almost everything else in Lincoln’s life, The Ultimate Position has turned out to be a sparrow fart.
