How Kaavya Viswanathan Got Freyed

First it was James Frey, now it's Kaavya Viswanathan.

Kaavya Viswanathan, in case you haven't been paying attention, is the fetching Harvard sophomore who wrote a novel with the endearingly dorky title “How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life.” Its author, who received a half-million book contract while still in high school, has sold her first novel to DreamWorks and even appeared on the CBS Early Show on which, if I remember correctly, host Harry Smith did everything but lean over and drool in her lap.

As far as I know she has not appeared on Oprah, which, under the circumstances, is just as well.

The Harvard Crimson is reporting that several passages in Viswanathan's novel appear to have been plagiarised from another novel, "Sloppy Firsts," by Megan F. McCafferty, a former editor at Cosmopolitan. Viswanathan is not commenting on the story at the moment. When reached by cell phone by the Crimson they quote her as saying, "I have no idea what you are talking about," a statement that, I suspect, will be revised and extended in the days to come, because trust me, this story is not going away any time soon.

Based on the quotes in the Crimson story, the similarities are too many and blatant to be a coincidence.

Part of this story is just what the Germans call schadenfreude. I'm sure there are a lot of undergraduates at Harvard who are secretly or not-so-secretly pleased that the sophomore with the half-million dollar book contract is being unmasked as a plagiarist. It makes them feel better about their own futures. After all, what will Harvard graduates do for a living once "The Simpsons" is cancelled?

The irony is that plagiarism has a long and distinguished history in literature -- and some of our greatest authors have practiced it (or at the very least been accused of it). Shakespeare borrowed from many other writers, most notably the Roman poet Ovid. Both Laurence Sterne (author of "Tristram Shandy") and the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge were accused of plagiarism. Edgar Allan Poe accused Longfellow of plagiarism, only to be charged with it himself. The Japanese author Natsume Soseki used to practice what he called "the art of artificial inspiration" -- that is, reading another author's work immediately before starting to work on his own writing. Jonathan Swift got his knowledge of what it was like to be a sailor in "Gulliver's Travels" by copying it out of other people's books on seafaring. Oscar Wilde's first book of poetry was considered to be so derivative that a presentation copy was actually refused by his own college's library. George Harrison was successfully sued for plagiarism, and we now know that large chunks of Martin Luther King's doctoral thesis was ripped off from the work of another writer.

So if Kaavya Viswanathan is a plagiarist, at least she's in good company. As Orson Welles once had a character say, "It is perfectly all right to borrow from each other -- what we must never do is borrow from ourselves."

But it will be interesting to see if Viswanathan gets the full James Frey treatment, or whether her looks, gender and extreme youth serve to give her a pass.

Tom Moran