aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Sunday, April 30, 2006

Gladwell on Viswanathan

Malcolm Gladwell on Kaavya Viswanathan’s pummeling “by a hundred angry columnists, pundits and bloggers:”

Can someone tell me why? This is teen-literature. It’s genre fiction. These are novels based on novels based on novels, in which every convention of character and plot has been trotted out a thousand times before. If i wrote a detective story, set in 1930’s Los Angeles, about a cynical, hard-bitten private eye, with a drop dead gorgeous secretary and a series of lonely housewife clients, would anyone bat an eye? Of course not. It may be a stolen premise. But we accept that within the category of genre fiction a certain amount of borrowing of themes and plots and ideas is acceptable--even laudable. I buy lots of spy novels, not because they diverge from the spy novel model, but because they conform to it. I want my spy to have a troubled home life, and an inpenetrable gaze and to be handy with a revolver. But once we have conceded that in genre fiction its okay to borrow themes, why do we get so upset when genre novelists borrow something a good deal less substantial--namely phrases and sentences? Surely an idea is more consequential than a sentence.

I’ve quoted Gladwell’s New Yorker piece, Something Borrowed: Should a charge of plagiarism ruin your life?, time and time again; I agree completely with his argument. His reading of “actual passages” in this case leads him to conclude, “Calling this plagiarism is the equivalent of crying ‘copy’ in a crowded Kinkos.” The ones I read were somewhat more ambiguous.

I am inclined to think she was nothing more than a cog in the machine that produced this book, and that a half-million dollar contract to produce teen-lit genre fiction from a 19 year old college student has a distorting and deleterious effect on self-esteem. It just might lead a person to feel they have to be more than they reasonably can be.