IN THE NEWS
Not a fairytale end
SARMISHTA RAMESH
|
A look at the plagiarism controversy surrounding Kaavya Viswanathan's sensational debut.
|
This is such a tragic end to what began as a fairy tale debut for a young immigrant teen in search of academic excellence.
DUBIOUS DISTINCTION: Kaavya Viswanathan is the centre of a high profile drama. PHOTO: AP
NOT many authors have this dubious distinction. In the span of one short month, Kaavya Viswanathan has seen her status crumble from being the celebrated young genius author from Harvard to the most controversial figure in America today. If you haven't been following the saga of this Chennai born 19-year old, it goes something like this: "How Kaavya Viswanathan Got a Book Deal, Got Caught Copying and Got into Trouble" Her much talked about novel How Opal Mehta... that was the toast of literary circles until recently has now been recalled from all books store in the United States and her two-book contract has been cancelled after several accusations of plagiarism surfaced.
Striking similarities
On April 23, a fraternity daily newspaper, the Harvard Crimson broke the news that 40-odd passages in Viswanathan's book closely resemble those from the books of another author Megan McCafferty. Right after the scandal broke out, Viswanathan was quick to come out with an apology — however twisted it might have been. Viswanathan apologised to McCafferty and said she was a huge fan of the older author and had read her books several times all through high school. "I must have internalised the book more than I thought — this was totally unintentional," said Viswanathan and vowed to clean up her book for the next edition.
If you thought that an apologetic teen repentant on national television was enough to earn some brownie point, you thought wrong. On May 1, a second slew of plagiarism charges broke out. Similarities to Meg Cabot's 2000 novel The Princess Diaries and parallels between Viswanathan's book and two works by Salman Rushdie and Sophie Kinsella were pointed out. And soon enough, her publishing company decided to put an end to rhubarb. On May 3, Little, Brown and Company said it will not be publishing a revised edition of How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life and nor will it publish the second book under contract.
According to Nielsen BookScan, a monitoring agency that tracks 75 per cent of bookstore sales in the U.S., How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life had sold 9,600 copies by April 23 and the novel had reached 32nd place on New York Times bestseller list just before the books were recalled. And according to the Wall Street Journal, the recalled books will be either warehoused or destroyed.
This is such a tragic end to what began as a fairy tale debut for a young immigrant teen in search of academic excellence. But such scandals do not sit well with the American public.
Just a few months ago, another scandal broke over author John Frey's A Million Little Pieces. Frey had claimed the book to be an autobiography and had even received the ultimate stamp of approval — from Oprah Winfrey herself. Getting on Oprah's book club list is a novice writer's dream come true, as it is a guaranteed passport to success. Sure enough, the book sold several million copies before news leaked that Frey had embellished certain critical parts of his life's story for better read. Though his books were not recalled, the news of his lie had a dramatic impact on the sales of his book and these days Frey is pretty much a literary outcaste.
For Viswanathan, who can kiss her fledgling literary career goodbye, the controversy now enters the murky waters of legal mumbo-jumbo as her publishing house, Little, Brown & Co., and McCafferty's Bertelsmann AG's Crown book unit (and may be a few more, considering the number of parties alleging plagiarism) try to settle the dispute. But in the midst of all this, news outlets across the country have started unearthing information to questions that haven't added up since the very beginning — like the story of how a young girl seeking admission to an Ivy League college landed up with a half-million dollar book deal in the first place. Then there is the question — how much creative liberty did this teen writer have after all.
And this leads us to Ivy Wise and its CEO, Katherine Cohen. Ivy Wise is a group that counsels Ivy League bound students and parents wading through the confusing process of college admissions for a hefty price. Reports suggest that families shell out more that $20,000 for the chance to get into these top universities where they end up paying more than $40,000 a year.
How the deal happened
When Viswanathan met Cohen two years ago during her college admission process and casually mentioned that she worked on a novel during her spare time. Cohen, through her "contacts", immediately put her in touch with the movers and shakers at Little Brown and Co. Was this part of a more elaborate and glamorous pitch for Harvard admission from Ivy Wise?
In fact speaking to The Hindu a few weeks ago, Kaavya herself admitted that she did not expect anything to come out of the meeting with the publishers. The report of how exactly Little Brown and Co, a reputed publishing company, decided to give a hefty first-time deal to a high school student gets murky. Summarising the sequence of events, the New York Time reports, "Ms. Cohen showed some of Ms. Viswanathan's writing to Suzanne Gluck (at Little Brown)... Ms. Viswanathan said that she had written a piece in the vein of The Lovely Bones, the 2002 best-seller by Alice Sebold, but that Ms. Gluck thought that it was too dark."
And in her interview with The Hindu (published April 23) Viswanathan admitted that she was not a comic writer to begin with and that the publishers asked her to "find her voice" — Were they asking for a formulaic "voice" like Opal Mehta who would appeal to the large teen target audience? And in retrospect, this seems like a tall order for a teen who was hardly comfortable with the genre. And then there is the question of Viswanathan's creative liberty. In the same interview with The Hindu, Viswanathan spoke about how she had an "argument" with her editors not to let her heroine Opal go back to her frumpy clothes after her makeover had made her one of the most popular girls at school. "There was no way I could let Opal go back to her old wardrobe. I personally love my high heels and short skirts so much that I did not want Opal slipping back," she said. But in the book, Opal does go back to her old ways of dressing and book ends on a feel-good note about being happy in one's own skin.
Interestingly, the copyrights section of the book has the name of the "packaging" company "Alloy Entertainment" first, followed by Viswanathan's name. Usually copyrights are deferred to the authors. So why is a packaging company reaping the benefits of copyrights. And how much of the $500,000 did Alloy Entertainment receive? Packaging companies typically work like sub-contractors for bigger publishing houses. But these days, these "out-sourced" businesses seem to have tremendous control over the fate of a book. 17th Street, the division of Alloy Entertainment that handles Viswanathan's book along with other tween-oriented novels, is reported to have helped Viswanathan "conceptualize and plot the book". And, in 2005, 17th Street was caught in the middle of another plagiarism controversy. So how much of an input did 17th Street actually have over the final novel. And who was actually responsible for the plagiarism — the author or the packaging firm or was this a combined effort? Unfortunately, as Salman Rushdie recently said: "I know when I write a book it's my name on the book, so I stand or fall by what I sign. And so must she". And so the buck stops with Kaavya and Kaavya alone. But for now, the moral of the story remains: "Don't judge a book by its cover. You never know if you are going to find the story written by the actual author inside!
Printer friendly
page
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Literary Review
