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04/25/2006: "How Opal Metha Plagiarized, Got Caught, and Got in Trouble: A Saga"
Hi all,
Some of you may’ve heard by now that young—and I mean YOUNG—writer and current Harvard sophomore Kaavya Viswanathan, whose book, HOW OPAL METHA GOT KISSED, GOT WILD, AND GOT A LIFE, has been found to have “borrowed” heavily from Megan McCafferty’s books SLOPPY FIRSTS and SECOND HELPINGS. I guess it turns out that anywhere from 20 to 40 passages were lifted from McCafferty’s books, altered slightly to prevent Google spot-checks.
Follow this (broken, I’m sure) link to the NY Times story, or google the author’s name to get the full story.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/25/books/25book.html
Now, anyone who’s read my James Frey commentary, such as it was, might expect me to lump Ms. Viswanathan in the same boat. Oddly, I don’t. And I can’t say why, exactly, I castigate Frey (although I’ve softened on him, after Oprah’s face-saving evisceration; if anything, I dislike Oprah more than I used to) and not Viswanathan. It’s a combination of factors, really.
For one, her age. She was sixteen when she signed a 2-book, $500,000 deal. For those of you not “in the know,” people in the publishing industry call this, in layman’s terms, “A Big Fucking Book Deal.” On top of that, it was optioned by Warner Brother’s for film adaptation.
So Viswanathan’s had a target on her back from day one—every writer who wished they’d signed a deal that big, every would-be writer who never got where they wanted or thought they deserved, every person who pictures Viswanathan swimming around in a bathtub full of hundred dollar bills—all of these people are waiting in the weeds with sharpened swords, waiting to jab.
And I’ve found that, among writers (and, I imagine, all creative circles) jealousy is an ugly, ugly thing. I mean, was yours truly jealous when he heard some wet-behind-the-ears pup, a HARVARD pup no less, had signed such a major deal? Of course; I chewed up a hank of carpet off my living room floor I was so pissed! (Okay, so I don’t have a living room; I have “a” room). But then I spit the carpet out and had an epiphany: what good does my jealousy do? Nothing. And again, is it Viswanathan’s fault her publisher dropped a bundle on her? No; she’s caught up in the obsessive, youth-crazy industry, which, from my experience, is every bit as youth-centric as the movie biz.
[My own personal example of this: I was 30 when Rust and Bone came out. If you look at the biographical info in the front of the book, you’ll see it says I’m born in 1976. No, I was born in 1975. But the book was accepted when I was 28, in the system throughout my 29th year, and published Sept. 2005, when I was a month over 30 years old. But in some of Penguin’s publicity literature, you’ll see 29-year-old writer Craig Davidson... It’s like, 30 is a disease; I enter the realm of the terminally unhip! Joke’s on them—I was unhip at 22!]
So it is Viswanathan’s fault that she had this huge pressure put on her at an age when I, you, and most everyone else on earth was delivering Atomic Wedgies and struggling with Grade 11 trigonometry? All she did was write a book; she never set out to sign a half-million dollar contract; she’s probably deeply overwhelmed at the whole thing. If anything, I blame the publishers, who love—LOVE!—to trot out these young writers, like they’re novelty acts, like they’re a dancing monkey—look what they can do, and so young! Watch it dance and tumble about! Guiseppe, crank the organ louder!
I don’t know where this whole “prepubescent writer” kick started, and in a way I rode it myself (I rode the “Young-ish writer” ticket), but there are lots of them out there. Helen Oyeyemi was young when she wrote THE ICARUS GIRL (published last year to great fanfare), and it seems they’re getting younger every day. I think the crown prince of this phenomena is Christopher Paolini, teenaged writer of the fantasy ERAGON which sold like gangbusters; I do believe though, that the growth curve for fantasy nerds is more rapid. Paolini was probably crafting Dungeons and Dragons scenarios from a very young age, so it was not a huge step turning one of those adventures into a book. I keep thinking I’ll soon see a headline like:
THIRD-TRIMESTER FETUS INKED TO 3-BOOK DEAL!
The article will include this, from the purchasing editor:
“I heard about this fetus in New Jersey whose in-utero brain-waves were off the charts! I didn’t want to be left out in the cold when this kid was born, so I signed him based on a few grainy ultrasound images. You should see the kid’s cranium—big as a pomegranate! I expect big things from this as-yet-unnamed fetus; it could be our next Hemingway or our next Atwood; it’s genitals aren’t fully developed yet, so I don’t know!”
Then, of course, you’ve got all the people waiting to pounce on this poor kid. This includes jealous writers, jealous wannabe writers, and all those depressed, pitiful housewives (and house-husbands) who never really accomplished a damn thing in their fairly sad existences, and deep down they know this, and they live—I mean, it’s probably the only thing getting them up most mornings—to rip holes in other people in order to make themselves feel less insignificant. These are the sorts of morons who log into amazon.com to fill Viswanathan’s book page with dopey 1-star ratings, writing things like: “FOR SHAME!” (Yes, all in caps letters; those sort of people) “FOR SHAME ON YOU FOR PLAGERIZZING ALL THIS STUF AND YOU SHUD BE PUT IN PRIZON FOR AL YOR DAZE!”
And then there’s my favorite sort of loser, the one who really, “pities” Viswanathan. (And yes, there is one of these on amazon.com, except they’ve spelled “pity” as “pitty”). These jackasses are the ones who take the holier-than-thou stance, the ones I picture shaking their heads mock-sadly, these people who I imagine think they’re so wondrous, that their piss smells like rosewater, that they can’t recall the last time they ever, ever in their lives, did something they had any reason to be ashamed of. These people have what I believe to be “selective lobotomies”: they can’t remember all the dumb useless asshole-ish shit they’ve done, which clears them up to “pitty” people like Viswanathan. Which is hilarious—Viswanathan is 18, at Harvard, signed a half-mil book deal, is driven and hardworking I’m sure and probably a decent person—what is there to “pitty,” exactly? If anything, I “pitty” the people who rush out to amazon.com and their blogs and message boards to write about how much they “pitty” poor Viswanathan. Save your pity for yourselves, you fucking tools. I would pity myself if I had no life, no real successes, was so deeply ashamed of myself that I needed to go to amazon.com to state how much I “pittied” a young, successful, hardworking writer. Like, fuck off.
Another thing I’ve been hearing—this from writers with their noses out of joint—is how “lazy” Viswanathan was. Lazy? When I was sixteen I was sitting around eating expired Twinkies from the Hostess outlet in Niagara Falls, sitting on my ass playing Sega Genesis NHL '92 and generally finding every way out of doing any sort of work. Most 16-year-olds, I’d wager, are lazy. Viswanathan was not a lazy 16-year-old. Lazy sixteen-year-olds—lazy people, period—don’t have the energy, intellectual or otherwise, to write a novel. There’s plenty of other things they could be doing, like picking the jam from between their toenails, or seeing how long they can sit in one place without moving at all, until their muscles turn into that clear jelly-like substance that binds head cheese together. No, Viswanathan is a keener, and while I have a certain distaste for keeners and always will (the lazy person’s natural enemy is, of course, the keener, who makes the lazy person feel his laziness more acutely, which naturally leads to resentment), she is not “lazy.” And I realize these people are saying she’s intellectually lazy, but even that doesn’t wash with me; intellectually lazy 16-year-olds don’t write novels, wether they plagiarize bits or not.
And hey, listen, do I think it’s a wonderful thing that an 18-year-old’s been given a huge contract and is feted and maybe took a shortcut to the sort of success a lot of writers, myself included, are likely to never find? And do I think it’s really fair to put the pressures or expectations on a kid who can’t yet drink legally? No, but you’ve got kids earning millions in pro sports leagues, too; everything’s accelerated, youth is king, and if there’s a shaved nickel to be made someone’s gonna try to make it. I can’t imagine how I would’ve handled myself in Viswanathan’s situation; I imagine you might’ve found my drunken, flabby, redheaded, 18-year-old corpse washed ashore on the banks of the Hudson river after one publishing party or another. As much as part of me envies Viswanathan, and thinks she’d have been better served taking her success at a later age rather than going through the meatgrinder now, I blame her for very little of it.
What I see is a 16-year-old kid who made a mistake. A big mistake, only in that it happened on such a big stage. If every 16-year-old who got caught plagiarizing got their names splashed over newspaper pages...well, it’d have to be a BIG fucking page. 16-years-old is the age to make mistakes and learn from them—and hopefully not to pay the price Viswanathan’s going to pay, a price doled out by all the fuckwits who “pitty” her while at the same time her publisher takes a few healthy steps back, arms raised like they’re being robbed, despite creating the whole thing in the first place.
What bugs me—and this, I’ve started to see, is probably my biggest beef of all beefs—is that people today seem critically unable to see the bad parts of themselves, or at least acknowledge them. Instead of people taking a deep, objective, and honest look at the situation and saying, “Hey, I could’ve done something just like that as a teenager,” we instead have legions of blinkered idiots saying how “pittiful” it all is; their wrath assumes that they themselves would never have done the same thing, which is true because none of them—not ONE of the pathetic creeps—would ever have worked hard enough or applied themselves enough to accomplish what Viswanathan has. The level of commitment they’re capable of mustering goes no further than their outraged, semi-literate amazon.com, message board, and blog posts.
Hey, Pot? This is the Kettle calling. You’re fucking black.
People in glass houses.
Why point out the mote in mine eye when you’ve got a honking big plank stuck in your own?
Viswanathan made a mistake. If you never made a mistake as a teenager, I urge you to take her to task for it. I, for one, have no leg to stand on.
All best, Craig.