…but that doesn’t mean we aren’t loaded with opinions about you! Sonia Singh (our expert on original Indian-American fiction) emailed again to invoke Fox Mulder: “All serial killers want to get caught. Their mistakes aren’t so much stupid as intentional…” Which, funnily enough, is roughly what I spent forty-five minutes yesterday discussing with a guy who’d just seen The Squid and the Whale and was convinced Kaavya Viswanathan had self-sabotaged her novel to get back at her overbearing parents. And while NYU sophomore David Seaman (The Real Meaning of Life) worries that other teen writers are going to suffer the extra scrutiny for Kaavya’s transgressions, he observes, “Surely people know that young writers can be original. Anne Frank didn’t have to ‘lift’ material. And Hunter S. Thompson was 22 when he started writing Rum Diary.” To which we might also add Christopher Paolini…or, for that matter, current Harvard sophomore Nick McDonnell (who’s probably stopped answering the phone to avoid dealing with silly press inquiries).
“As an author who has put my heart and soul into every page of my books,” writes “chica lit” novelist Mary Castillo (right), “I am so happy that publishers, readers, my fellow writers and the media are taking plagiarism seriously. And I believe we have Oprah and James Frey to thank for the more responsible handling of the Viswanathan scandal by her publisher.” Sarah Strohmeyer, on the other hand, takes a slightly more cynical approach, observing that “the Associated Press is covering Kaavya Viswanathan’s plagiarism scandal with more diligence than their reporting on Katrina and WMDs put together.” And Malcolm Gladwell doesn’t see the big deal, because if he got over being plagiarized, why should some genre writer cranking out “novels based on novels based on novels, in which every convention of character and plot has been trotted out a thousand times before,” have anything to complain about?
He then dismisses the material Viswanathan swiped from Megan McCafferty by sniffing, “Let’s just say this isn’t the first twenty lines of Paradise Lost.” (On the other hand, I found Jessica Darling in Charmed Thirds a much more plausible college freshwoman than Charlotte Simmons, which might mean that McCafferty’s a better writer than Tom Wolfe.) This raises a good question: How talented do you have to be before Malcolm Gladwell thinks it would be wrong to steal your literary voice? UPDATE: Enough people had a similar reaction to Gladwell’s post—including a sharp rebuke from a linguistic analyst—that he backed off his position within hours…