Plagiarized or packaged to death?

Or both?

Far be it from me to judge what exactly happened with Kaavya Viswanathan’s novel, How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life. I haven’t read it, and I don’t intend to—wouldn’t intend to even if the publisher hadn’t turned around and pulled it off bookstore shelves. But when I read all the off-shoot accounts of the state of book packaging today, I find myself sympathizing at least a tiny bit, as Rachel Pine seems to, with the young author. Not enough to defend her, perhaps, or to excuse what happened, but honestly—what a confusing business this has become.

I recall an old episode of The Avengers on TV, in which a publisher created a computer to crank out formula novels, then passed them off as having been written by a human being. I thought for sure that was pure fantasy until I began reading about this plagiarism case. Kaavya Viswanathan’s name is on the book’s copyright page, but according to what I’ve read so is Alloy Entertainment’s. So who is to blame? How did this happen?

While discussing it with my husband earlier today I remembered how my love of the written word manifested itself as a teenager. There were authors who could’ve written anything and I would’ve soaked up their words like gravy. Did I internalize what they said? You betcha. During those years my mind was a sponge, and I fell in love with turns of phrase, ways of using language. I recall teachers marking up my papers when I unconsciously used English spellings rather than American for words like “colour” and “favourite” because so many of my favorite authors at the time were British. (In those days the US printings of their books weren’t edited for such things as they are today.)

I don’t remember now whether it was Mary Stewart’s The Crystal Cave or The Hollow Hills that I first read as a hardcover from the library, then picked up as a paperback and read it again. At the end of the paperback I found a misprint of a few paragraphs, where lines were interchanged and some were left out. I marked up corrections in the margin without referring to the hardcover. A few months later I went back and checked the hardcover. I’d remembered the precise wording. I had apparently memorized those passages my first time through.

I couldn’t do that today. Today I don’t even know which of the two books it happened with. I seem to recall it had a yellowish cover and that makes me think it had to be The Hollow Hills. My brain has aged enough that such a feat would be unlikely though I may be every bit as impressionable today. It would take at least two or three readings for me to memorize even a favorite author’s wording now. I also like to think I’d realize I was remembering another author’s words, not making up my own. But who’s to know? No one offered me half a million dollars to write a book at seventeen. While that could seem to the bystander to be a lot like winning the lottery, I suspect to many writers it would mean that much more pressure to produce a product.

In Viswanathan’s words, according to Rachel Pine:

“I wasn’t aware of how much I may have internalized Ms. McCafferty’s words.” She has also apologized, repeatedly, profusely, and to my ears, genuinely. But she also seems at a loss to explain just what happened. In an interview with the New York Times, she said, “I really thought the words were my own; I guess it’s just been in my head,” she added. “I feel as confused as anyone about it, because it happened so many times.”

When I heard about Viswanathan’s novel I thought to myself it was obvious her editor had never read the Megan McCafferty novels she’s said to have lifted from, or surely this would’ve been noticed early on. Then I read this in the New York Times piece:

The relationships between Alloy and the publishers are so intertwined that the same editor, Claudia Gabel, is thanked on the acknowledgments pages of both Ms. McCafferty’s books and Ms. Viswanathan’s “How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life.”

So what happened there? And I wonder, are the days of the lone writer crafting a book from his or her heart gone?

In an off-shoot article, John Barlow paints a portrait of his own book packaging nightmare, and leaves me wondering why so many people need to be involved in writing a story, only to leave the author hanging out on a limb, alone, held responsible for the end product—which perhaps isn’t even really his creation. I think books are better when not written by committee. Look what that’s done to television—hundreds of channels and, more often than not, nothing new worth watching.

In this case it appears the author is to blame, and perhaps others are to blame as well. In the end it’s all about honesty, not passing off another’s work as your own. I’m relieved there’s so much outcry, because I worry these days about how accepting we are of dishonesty and half truths, and how eager our leaders are to repeat untruths until (they hope) we come to believe them as true. But it’s also important to me, in this world where we seem to have to cast blame, that the right party or parties be named. I suspect the author will take the brunt of this, while the business entities involved will continue to do business as usual.