Stick a Fork in Kaavya
...she's done. Little, Brown has announced that it will not publish a revised edition of How Opal Mehta... after all—as predicted on this website seconds after Little, Brown said that it would—and it also will not be publishing KV's second novel.
Here are reports in
the Crimson, the
Times, and the
Boston CBS affiliate website. (Thanks to the reader who posted this last.)
And thus the cycle of scandal is almost complete; you can feel in the stories linked to above a sense of, yup, justice is done, the bad girl is exiled, and the publishing insiders whom everyone in the media knows have escaped pretty much unscathed. At the very least, with no long term damage.
I hope things don't work out that way—because frankly (and here I shock even myself), Kaavya Viswanathan is getting screwed.
Yes, she's guilty of complicity in a literary fraud. She either committed plagiarism, or put her name on a book written (and plagiarized) by ghostwriters. She has paid a price for this complicity, and will do so for a long time.
In her defense, KV's morality may not have risen above that of her publisher, but it never sank below that of her publisher.
For Little, Brown's move to suggest that all the misbehavior in this unfortunate episode is KV's is disingenuous at best. The publishing company knew that KV had turned to Alloy Entertainment for help—if memory serves, they recommended Alloy.
And Little, Brown knows what Alloy does for a living; the company hires ghostwriters to ghostwrite books. What did it think Alloy would do for KV? Give her a lollipop and send her on her way?
Even if there was no plagiarism involved, Little, Brown would still have been foisting a fraud on the public: its massive promotion of a teenage author as a literary prodigy, when it knew full well that she was no such thing.
Let's look at this from Viswanathan's potential perspective: Based on skimpy writing samples and a highly marketable persona, an esteemed publisher throws quite a lot of money at her. The company then sends her to a ghostwriting company. Somewhere along the line—and perhaps not from KV—plagiarism occurs. When it is revealed, she is so embarrassed that she didn't really write the book, or the entire book, that she takes responsibility for it. Then it turns out that there was more plagiarism....
But all along, she's just been doing what she thinks is standard operating procedure in the publishing world. And, perhaps, it is—until they get caught, and then they blame it on the author and cut her loose.
At Little, Brown, today, I'm sure there's a sense of exhaustion, but probably too there's some feeling that they've turned the corner on this fiasco. Pretty successfully, they've managed to pin all the bad news on a 19-year-old college student. They'll move on fast, with few consequences.
Not so for KV, who doesn't have a corporate machine to protect her, or press flacks to take reporters' calls, or an easy way to redefine her identity. She's just out there, tarred and feathered, on her own.
Why do I feel so strongly that KV has been made a scapegoat? And why do I think that the people at Little, Brown, are lying?
Because a few years back,
they did the exact same thing to me.....and they lied about it then, too. (If you're interested, click the link and search for the phrase "agent's behavior.")
