The Last Chronicle of Kaavya

The final episode of the Kaavya Viswanathan plagiarism saga seems (and I use the word "seems" advisedly, if not tentatively) to have been written.

The New York Times is reporting that "Little, Brown, the publisher of the novel ... said it would immediately recall all editions from store shelves." This after saying yesterday that they wouldn't consider doing exactly what they're doing now. Stores have been instructed by the publisher not to sell any more copies of the first edition, and to return any unsold copies.

Of the 100,000 copies printed, at least 45,000 had not been shipped to stores, and God knows how many remain unsold. That would make for a pretty nifty auto-da-fé, don't you think? Maybe in the middle of Harvard Yard? I'm sure that they'd get quite a crowd of cheering undergraduates. Maybe it could be a Pay-Per-View special.

The book is going to be revised in order to remove all traces of Viswanathan's plagiarizing of teen author Megan McCafferty, whose third novel is currently, according to the Times, ahead of Viswanathan's purloined epic on the Times best seller list (#30 to Viswanathan's #32).

Will "How Opal Mehta Yadda Yadda Yadda" sell in its revised and republished form? Will copies of the first, plagiarized edition sell for astronomical sums on eBay? Will anyone give a crap about Kaavya Viswanathan a year from now?

I guess we'll just have to wait and see. But for the moment I'm just glad that the worst week in this young woman's life is over, and she can go back to being an ordinary Harvard undergraduate. Of course, it also means that I'll have to find other things to write about, but that's just the way it crumbles... cookie-wise.

Tom Moran