Little, Brown has decided to pull How Opal Mehta… from bookstores….apparently 45 passages of plagiarism was just too much. Now the publisher says it will allow Kaavya Viswanathan (KV from here on in) to revise the book, and they will re-release it.

Don’t bet the ranch on that.

Maybe it’s from reading these reviews on Amazon—where, as of this writing, Opal Mehta is ranked #29, which would likely make it a bestseller—or maybe it’s because I still feel that the truth hasn’t come out, but I have started to feel sorry for Kaavya Viswanathan. She must be going through hell.

It’s not that I let her off the hook. A photographic memory? Please. She had a photographic memory of 45 passages? It’s laughable. I don’t think she even read Megan McCafferty; that was the work of the good folks at Alloy Entertainment. (Remember, this is the young woman who claimed that her preferred reading was Henry James and P.G. Wodehouse.)

And as readers of this blog know, I have somewhat strong feelings about plagiarism.

But I do feel that KV got caught up in something many young people (and adults, for that matter) would have been seduced by: the publishing machine. Her fancy-pants college advisor sends her to a literary agency, which snaps her up. A wan sample of her work is circulated to publishers, who on the strength of—what? certainly not her writing, it’s entirely pedestrian—snap her up. (I’d be very curious to know if a photograph was included with the sample pages circulated to publishers.) When KV, at the beginning of her freshman year at Harvard, finds that writing is hard, she’s told not to worry about it, the “packagers” at Alloy Entertainment can help. And they do. Somehow, a manuscript is produced.

At every step of the way, an adult is telling her that this is business as usual, standard operating procedure. And when that happens, it’s easy to lose your moral compass. (If, to be sure, she ever had one.)

Yes, KV made mistakes. (And from Harvard’s point of view, this kind of episode really ought to prompt some campus soul-searching about why people go to Harvard, what they do to get in, and whether the university has lost its soul. To that effect, check out these thoughts from Crimson editors on the deep inner meaning of the scandal, particularly Lauren Schuker’s short essay.)

Yes, KV was a complicit pawn, but she was still a pawn. The ultimate responsibility here lies with the adults…who, of course, will not bear the brunt of the bad publicity.

Someday, I’d like to hear KV tell what really happened along the route to publication of this book. Wouldn’t it be nice if Michael Pietsch—who, the Crimson points out, is also a Harvard grad—stepped up to the plate and said, “It’s a common practice with young adult literature to enlist the help of ghostwriters, and in this case, one of those ghostwriters committed plagiarism. We apologize for violating the trust between a publisher and our readers.”

Never happen, but it would be nice.

Meantime, KV, as someone who has himself lived through literary scandal—we both got harassed by Katie Couric—I can tell you, this will pass. The best way to survive it is to prove everyone wrong, and write a good book next time. Along the way, you have to discover the real joys of writing, the satisfaction that comes from doing it the hard way—i.e., sans ghostwriters— and the growth that comes with knowing that you did it something extremely difficult by yourself.

I wish you luck.