The controversy surrounding Kaavya Viswanathan’s deployment of Megan McCafferty’s turns of phrase came to a head late Monday as the Harvard Crimson, which first broke the story about the problematic passages in the sophmore’s debut novel, How Opal Mehta… Got A Life, ran a public apology from Viswanathan: “I wasn’t aware of how much I may have internalized Ms. McCafferty’s words. I am a huge fan of her work and can honestly say that any phrasing similarities between her works and mine were completely unintentional and unconscious. My publisher and I plan to revise my novel for future printings to eliminate any inappropriate similarities.” If you read Publishers Lunch, though, you know from Michael Cader’s reporting that doing so may conceivably take a lot of revisions…and PW Daily is also reporting that sorry isn’t good enough as far as McCafferty’s publisher is concerned.
The Crimson also continued its coverage by uncovering a letter from Random House to Little, Brown that declared, in part, “Given the alarming similarities in the language, structure and characters already found in these works, we are certain that some literal copying actually occurred here.” (They also have some legal analysis that lays out the issues involved quite neatly.) Dinitia Smith is forced to play catch-up, but her NYT piece does at least contain a new wrinkle with Michael Pietsch’s declaration that future printings of Opal Mehta will contain “an acknowledgment to Ms. McCafferty.” It’s like when James Cameron made The Terminator and forgot to mention how many times he’d watched The Outer Limits, and he had to put Harlan Ellison’s name on the credits when the video came out!
Ron observes: It’s quite a jump from “I have no idea what you are talking about” to “I am a huge fan of her work,” as well as describing Sloppy Firsts and Second Helpings as “two wonderful novels… which spoke to me in a way few other books did.” Harvard’s other newspaper, the Indepedent observes that Viswanathan’s public reading preferences have been much more highbrow. “If McCafferty’s books had ‘spoke[n]’ to Viswanathan,” the alternative weekly notes, “she kept it to herself.”
Meanwhile, all day yesterday, one of the disputed passages kept nagging at me:
McCafferty: “Sabrina was the brainy Angel. Yet another example of how every girl had to be one or the other: Pretty or smart.”
Viswanathan: “Moneypenny was the brainy female character. Yet another example of how every girl had to be one or the other: smart or pretty.”
So I dug the Opal Mehta galley out of my stacks and found that section, which is preceded by the observation, “Somewhere in the eighth grade, after watching a marathon of James Bond movies, I realized why James was never going to be with Miss Moneypenny.” Well, I’ve seen all the James Bond movies several times, and both the Lois Maxwell and the Samantha Bond versions of Moneypenny prove you can be both smart and pretty. So either Viswanathan may have been thinking of Caroline Bliss (presumably, because she’s wearing glasses, more brainy and less pretty), which would be pretty obscure, since she only appeared in the two Dalton flicks, or those McCafferty vibes that affected her so much were especially strong while she was working on that section. And Elizabeth Merrick is even more skeptical than me: “This is not a case of a young writer magically internalizing prose, as she claims,” she claims. “That is not the way it works. She held the book open and copied. If you covet another writer’s sentences, you know exactly where they are on the page in the book on the shelf in the room and you never ever ever go there.”
But while all the hoopla was going on Monday, what did Viswanathan’s Harvard peers have to say? Sarah went digging through their blogs to find out.
Sarah writes: Some of the reactions in the wake of the charges have ranged from flash cartoons to simple schadenfreude, but over at Metafilter (by way of Maud Newton), one of Viswanathan’s college instructors, posting as “mowglisambo” comments on her time in his class: “I was surprised to learn she had written a book, as her writing was awful– I had given her low grades on her papers. I feel bad for her, even though she was always falling asleep in section (as if you don’t notice a snoozing person sitting at a conference table for ten). Plagiarizing from chick lit has to be some kind of double whammy against artistic integrity.”
But for all those who are dead certain that Viswanathan’s literary career is over, consider the case of Janet Dailey. Nine years ago, she heavily plagiarized several works of bestselling romance writer Nora Roberts. There were lawsuits, there was a settlement…and Dailey still has a career, which continues to this day. Interestingly, the PW article I linked to has a very telling quote from Roberts about the fallout from the case: “I don’t think it would have happened in any other genre. It was ‘It’s romance, let’s take a shot. Let’s talk about heaving bosoms.” The same, it seems, applies awfully well to chick lit…