Bend it like Viswanathan - an Opal Mehta plagiarism scandal round-up post
One post on Opal Mehta just isn’t enough, so here’s my second one.
Why am I attracted to this story? Because of all the proper, high-minded reasons: Integrity, honesty, creativity. Plus Harvard, a hot young chick, Ivy League admissions counselors, freaking half a million bucks (”half a rock” as Tony Soprano called it a couple of episodes ago), and a hot young chick.
What’s not to like?
There is one other thing. While my jury is on to what extent, if any, Kaavya Viswantahan’s Indian background plays into this scandal, several Indian and Desi bloggers think there is a connection (while some disagree). Because of their incredible competitiveness and academic achievements, Indians are making their presence felt in America’s cognitive elites, an elite Opal Mehta’s now disgraced author was practically destined to join.
On top of that, reactions to OM bring up interesting little tidbits about American life.
The best post on the Opal scandal I’ve seen is by desi lawyer-writer Ms. Viswanathan (whose post inspired the title of this post of mine). She brings sound wisdom to the proverbial table. In her case, it’s personal, too:
“You see, the twit has my last name… Viswanathan is actually a common South Indian name–I know at least six Viswanathans myself–but this is the first Viswanathan who has made an ass out of herself in my profession.”
I’ve never encountered a Viswanathan myself and had no idea the name is common. Lawyer-writer Viswanathan (as opposed to plagiarist-soon-to-meet-lawyers Viswanathan) offers the following suggestions and insights:
Yes, the first Viswanathan with a ridiculous fiction book advance is not a struggling lawyerwriter, but an Ivy League overachiever who got her book published through an Ivy League admissions consultant who knew the right people…
And not through hard work, either I’m not against college consulting–I do it myself–but when a respected, flashy, high profile agent like Suzanne Gluck gets involved, you know the big bucks are about clout, not manuscript. The actual agent is someone else, but the mere fact that William Morris took on a 17-year old author put this deal on another level. This was a handshake-behind closed doors deal, with everybody’s eye on the almighty, oh-so-literary, South Asian teen market. Nobody was talking about the writing.
(Anyway, folks, this is the way to get a literary agent. Connections. Stop sending slush out now and start inviting people out to drinks. I’m not kidding).
She has a lot more of interesting things to say and you should definitely read her post.
Johanna Edwards, another writer, passes along some interesting speculation regarding the relationship between Viswanathan and the “conceptualizers” at 17th Street:
In fact, 17th Street actually shares the copyright on Opal with Viswanathan. That’s a pretty huge deal, and it generally doesn’t happen unless the book producer has been responsible for a really large chunk of the novel. In other words, there’s a pretty decent chance that much of (or even all of) Viswanathan’s novel was ghostwritten. At the very least, it’s highly likely 17th Street had a major hand in shaping Opal. They may have written the outline or even heavily rewritten the book before it went to press.
Another interesting theory was recounted on this blog: “One person suggested to me that maybe 17th Street made up some kind of proposal or guideline sheet that included these quotes from McCafferty’s book as a style-to-shoot-for kind of thing, and someone (Kaavya or one of her collaborators) thought he/she could lift it, without realizing the original source. That seems like something that might easily happen in the too-many-cooks world of book packaging.”
Public high school teacher “Ms. Cornelius” sees the incident as an example of the “cheating culture” that many teenagers have no problem accepting. She writes on her blog about a student of her’s whom she caught cheating:
This is not a rotten kid– just an incredibly polite but disorganized one who needs some reinforcement of study skills and a big dose of accountability. Kid comes to class late, asks to go the restroom in the middle of class about three times a week, leaves the second the bell rings, and refuses to get help from me or a tutor or a study group, even during free time during the school day. Apparently, Kid has been claiming that he has been coming to me for tutoring for months now. Kid has been telling me, meanwhile, that his coach won’t let him miss practice, even when that sport is not in season, because, apparently, I am THAT gullible in this kid’s eyes. Meanwhile, Coach hyperbolically emails me that Meanie Me may cost the kid a college scholarship (carbon copied to half the building) and then provides as supporting evidence every racial stereotype you can imagine. Does this guy not realize that he is implying that the kid can’t do the work because he’s a minority? And aren’t there SOME KIND of academic requirements for athletic scholarships– unless, of course, you play for the Nebraska Cornhuskers? (Kidding!– a bit…)
Read the comments as well.
Tim Cavanaugh at Reason’s blog Hit and Run skewers the plagiarist for her egotistical spin:
Viswanathan has also pledged to add an acknowledgement to McCafferty, whose books Sloppy Firsts and Second Helpings provided the source for some 40 phrases—so far—and the general outline of Viswanathan’s How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life. She also has bravely outed herself as a “huge fan” of McCafferty’s work.
But she forgot to add, “I’m such a huge fan that I never mentioned her name in public, not even once, until I got caught ripping her off. And in fact last week when the Newark Star-Ledger asked me about my inspirations I replied, ‘Nothing I read gave me the inspiration.’”
This is what is so infuriating about high-profile plagiarism cases. The victim (and I realize, as Jesse Walker has noted in another context, that McCafferty will most likely benefit from this contretemps) is always somebody the plagiarist regards as too small to worry about.
Chick-lit author Ally Carter posted a note with the intriguing slug how-opal-got-way-more-publicity-than.html, which, according to Google’s blog search, opened with this:
I am insanely jealous of all the super, amazing, incredible, overwhelming publicity that surrounded How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life before word broke that the author had stolen passages from another author
.
The slug now results in a 404 page not found so I guess Carter decided to spike that post. But this is still up.
There were people willing to defend the young plagiarist from charges of plagiarism, but they’re dwindling in numbers. For example, on April 25, GoodLookiN on The Great Indian Mutiny group blog dismissed the allegations:
Come on guys, seriously, how can you even call this plagiarism?
Obivously, as she herself admited, she has read the book and absorbed the idea.
How is that wrong? As a business journalist, I do that all the time, you read up everything written about a guy before you interview him and some of it is bound to appear on your final work too.Here is my take on the issue,
Young girls strikes it big in the publishing world at 19.
Some people turned green.
So they tooth comb every piece of similar work
Finds something similar and accuses her of plagarism.
But the next day it was Game Over:
It is becoming increasingly difficult to defend Kaavya Viswanathan.
In my previous post, I had argued that she be given the benefit of the doubt, you can’t exactly compare similarities to cut&paste jobs.But, there are as many as 24 instances of such “parallels” — found their way without even cosmetic changes to make detection difficult. On the other hand, the cosmetic changes, where introduced, are perhaps even more telling.
The Mighty Middle also broke a lance for the beleaguered plagiarist:
I have no dog in this fight. I don’t read any of the authors involved. I don’t read chick novels generally. But this charge of plagiarism, at least based on the evidence cited, is bullshit.
…
The Harvard Crimson has played a nasty little game of gotcha, and perhaps hurt this young writer’s career. The accusation that a grand total of perhaps 200 words, out of 80,000, are similar to some other writers words, and that this constitutes plagiarism, is ignorant nonsense. By those standards every article that appears in the Crimson and includes phrases such as “sources say,” or “we have learned,” is plagiarized.
Leave the girl alone.
Hilariously, he kept breaking lances the following day, yesterday. The Mighty Middle is a ghostwriter who’s produced commercials for the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, according to his bio page.
Most bloggers who have commented on the Opal Mehta scandal have little doubt that there was plagiarism, like ktbuffy:
I had lunch with a friend, also in publishing, and we spent a good portion of our hour talking about this, and I’ve spoken with other folks in the biz, and no one — NO ONE — thinks Viswanathan did this “unconsciously.” Where the matter seems to get a little more murky is whether 17th Street, the book’s packager, may have contributed to the case, intentionally or no, or whether their editors are just another line of readers that missed the plagiarism.
As mentioned above, some Indians/Indian-Americans claim to recognize the plagiarist’s cultural background, one that may have helped pushed her to places she should not have allowed herself to be pushed. Although not of Indian descent, Caroline M. does come from the same “cutthroat, get-into-college-or-you’re-doomed culture of suburban New Jersey” that shaped the Kaavya Viswanathan. However…
I have no sympathy for Kaavya Viswanathan. First of all, I don’t buy her “unconsciously adapted” excuse. What she did was plagiarism, plain and simple. I’ve been taking creative writing classes for years, I just finished a novella for credit, and I can tell you that I was downright paranoid about my writing even remotely resembling anyone else’s. There’s no way that Ms. Viswanathan couldn’t have noticed that her plot was parallelling that of Megan McCafferty’s Sloppy Firsts and Second Helpings, let alone word-for-word “adaptations.” And not only is she going to make her publisher look bad, she’s going to make Harvard look bad (they were still brushing off the Blair Hornstine tarnish), and she’s going to make young writers look bad. Ms. Viswanathan’s plagiarism was an act of utter immaturity that, I speculate, is going to negatively influence teenage and young female writers’ image in the publishing world for quite some time. How many legitimate “chick lit” writers are going to have their books picked apart and embarrassingly scrutinized for resemblance to earlier works as a result of this?
Laura Vanderkam sees Viswanathan’s unraveling as a fall of a rare supposed child prodigy who was exploited by money-hungry elders:
I was thrilled that Viswanathan got a chance to write. But now any other 17-year-old coming to a publisher with a novel will be greeted with a cold stare. All because some packagers wanted to make a quick buck and pulled a novel out of this young woman quicker than she could actually write it herself, and because a publisher wanted to get a fresh new face out there so badly they didn’t vet the manuscript.
There’s no holding it back at ReadySteadyGo:
I am LOVING this. This is hitting every. single. one. of my schadenfreude receptors. I get to watch someone who is: younger, more academically accomplished, more writerly-ly accomplished, and insufferably self-absorbed in interviews fail miserably. In her first public statement she admitted to copying! And then she retracted it and did that whole plagiarism sidestep of “I read the book my book rips off and loved it, and must not have realized how much of it stuck with me.” As if. This whole idea that she’s fallen prey to the less-probable side of the monkeys-with-typewriters theory is just laughable.
Gawker provides an interesting (and funny) analysis through an Indian intern:
Whatever dubious subcontinental wunderkind Kaavya Viswanathan did write, didn’t write, had ghost-written, cribbed, subconsciously borrowed, telepathically stole, or else was brainwashed into doing by a bunch of Pakistanis hell-bent on subverting India’s credibility in the burgeoning Southeast Asian chick-lit genre, at least one thing is clear: shit like this is the reason brown kids should stick to quantitative math and organic chemistry. Ms. Viswanathan, after all, had all the hallmarks of future i-banker or doctor. Namely:
Update:
The following sites have kindly linked to this post:
Boston Gal’s Open Wallet
Bostonist
Happy Scrappy
Universal Hub
I added another Opal Mehta post yesterday.
