It's Sloppier Than You Think

May 21, 2006

This week, publisher Little, Brown announced that Kaavya Viswanathan’s How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life would be removed from shelves forever, and—contrary to their initial statements—no revised editions will be published. DreamWorks Pictures cancelled their plans to adapt a movie version of the Harvard sophomore’s novel, and the author herself is “taking some time off” from school. The announcements follow several weeks of controversy after the Harvard Crimson first discovered similarities between Opal Mehta and two books, Sloppy Firsts and Second Helpings, by Megan McCafferty. Subsequent reviewers alleged that Viswanathan might also have borrowed passages from Salman Rushdie (Haroun and the Sea of Stories), Meg Cabot (The Princess Diaries) and Sophie Kinsella (Can You Keep a Secret?).

Coverage of the story has happily laid all of the blame on Ms. Viswanathan, mocking her initial statement that the plagiarism was “unconscious and unintentional,” the result of her “photographic memory” after reading McCafferty’s books in high school. And on some level they are right: any psychology professor will tell you that there’s no such thing as a photographic memory, and it’s all but impossible that the number of suspicious passages in Opal Mehta could have been produced unconsciously or unintentionally. But that doesn’t mean that the unsettling schadenfreude surrounding this case is justified. Not nearly enough attention is being paid to the book packaging giants that pitched, crafted, and co-wrote Ms. Viswanathan’s books (as well as some of the books from which she is supposed to have plagiarized), then left her high and dry when the scandal broke.

Alloy Entertainment, the New York Times reports, is “a behind-the-scenes creator of some of the hottest books in young-adult publishing.” Editors at Alloy decide on sexy, marketable plots for chick-lit books, even sketch the characters themselves, only later farming out the project to the “author” whose name will appear on the book jacket. Ms. Viswanathan was picked up by Alloy through agent William Morris, who thought that her life sounded marketable. (The heroine of Opal Mehta, like Ms. Viswanathan, is an Indian-American teenager with high-pressure parents who put her on a rigorous track to get in to Harvard.) Editors at Alloy helped Ms. Viswanathan with the first four chapters of her book, nudging her in the directions they knew would make a successful product. It was on the basis of those four chapters that Little, Brown signed Ms. Viswanathan’s book deal.

What happened next, while the book was being finished, is unclear. It could be, as the publishing house’s spokespeople would have us believe, that Ms. Viswanathan copied the phrases from McCafferty’s book, and her misdeeds slipped underneath the radar of the editors at Alloy. Of course, that would mean that the Alloy staff has a rather short memory, since at least one of the editors involved in creating Opal Mehta had also—just a few years earlier—worked on Sloppy Firsts and Second Helpings, from which the passages were borrowed. A more likely possibility is that Alloy knew all along that Opal Mehta sounded exactly like all of their other chick-lit hits—and that’s how they wanted it. This is, after all, a market that rewards mindless homogeneity: witness the four Dan Brown thrillers on this week’s fiction bestseller list.

Here’s an example of the kind of plagiarism at issue, helpfully provided by a graphic comparison in the May 1 Times. In Sophie Kinsella’s Can You Keep a Secret?, the heroine stumbles into “a full-scale argument about animal rights,” and one of her friends says, “The mink like being made into coats.” In Opal Mehta, Opal finds “a full-fledged debate over animal rights,” in which someone says, “The foxes want to be made into scarves.” Yes, Viswanathan probably stole the scene from her predecessor—but how are we supposed to react to that theft when even the original wasn’t all that creative? When cookie-cutter fiction is the goal, how are we supposed to assess plagiarism? Stuart Klawans of The Nation said it best: “This is a story about clichés and stereotypes passing from one subliterary commercial product to another.”