NYT smacks down Viswanathan's plagiarism

Newspapers are often soft on plagiarists. Rather than explaining how unlikely it is that an author could have accidentally copied multiple word-for-word passages from another person's book, the reporter will frequently just quote the plagiarist expressing dismay at how such a thing could have happened.

So it was good to see the New York Times juxtaposing Kaavya Viswanathan's statement that she is "very surprised and upset" and that she "wasn't aware of how much [she] may have internalized Ms. McCafferty's words" with the actual, obvious plagiarism in her novel:

[T]he borrowings may be more extensive than have previously been reported. The Crimson cited 13 instances in which Ms. Viswanathan's book closely paralleled Ms. McCafferty's work. But there are at least 29 passages that are strikingly similar.

At one point in "Sloppy Firsts," Ms. McCafferty's heroine unexpectedly encounters her love interest. Ms. McCafferty writes:

"Though I used to see him sometimes at Hope's house, Marcus and I had never, ever acknowledged each other's existence before. So I froze, not knowing whether I should (a) laugh, (b) say something, or (c) ignore him and keep on walking. I chose a brilliant combo of (a) and (b).

" 'Uh, yeah. Ha. Ha. Ha.'

"I turned around and saw that Marcus was smiling at me."

Similarly, Ms. Viswanathan's heroine, Opal, bumps into her love interest, and the two of them spy on one of the school's popular girls.

Ms. Viswanathan writes: "Though I had been to school with him for the last three years, Sean Whalen and I had never acknowledged each other's existence before. I froze, unsure of (a) what he was talking about, or (b) what I was supposed to do about it. I stared at him.

" 'Flatirons,' he said. 'At least seven flatirons for that hair.'

" 'Ha, yeah. Uh, ha. Ha.' I looked at the floor and managed a pathetic combination of laughter and monosyllables, then remembered that the object of our mockery was his former best friend.

"I looked up and saw that Sean was grinning."

For more examples of the plagiarism, see the Harvard Crimson, which broke the story, and the Boston Globe.

Comments

[awprokop]

This story didn't make sense to me just because Sloppy Firsts is a wildly popular book-- why plagiarize from something that popular? Well, check out this article for one theory:

'As the Boston Globe reported in February, Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, Viswanathan's agent, found the budding novelist's original story idea, which was "darker" than Opal Mehta, not "commercially viable." To better cater to mainstream tastes, Walsh and Viswanathan turned to 17th Street Productions.' (This is a "book packaging" company, read the article for more.)

Viswanathan's been winning writing competitions for years before this. It's certainly possible that she cracked under the pressure and irrationally plagiarized because of the big book deal. I think it's more likely that someone at 17th Street decided to make her prose a bit less Harvard-y and a bit more "commercially viable," and was rather lazy in doing so. Either way, she's not being honest about what happened.