How Kaavya Viswanathan got assimilated, got a book contract, and got screwed

There's been a lot of huffing and puffing lately about the alleged plagiarism on the part of Harvard student Kaavya Viswanathan in her new book, How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life. Viswanathan has apparently lifted several linguistic tropes from another tween-lit author, Mary McCafferty, and the structure of the novel is the same (girl nabs musician dude and delivers graduation speech with the help of three girlfriends--what stunning originality!) Mike Straka of Fox News takes the opportunity to decry this "Me" generation. Young people today, they've got such a sense of entitlement! His biggest points of comparison are Jayson Blair and James Frey, but he curiously omits the case of Ben Domenech, the conservative blogger for the Washington Post who's extremely short tenure was marred by accusations of plagiarism (including mining from other conservatives like Jonah Goldberg and P.J. O'Rourke). But I digress.

Straka's position represents a typical cultural conservative complaint tied up in a paradox, whose dilemma has its horns in (1st) social and (2nd) artistic criticism: first, that today's crop of youngsters is radically individualistic thanks to decades of left-liberal ideology, and as a result feels entitled to any and everything. Any means justify the ends, resulting in debauched and undignified behavior. What we need is a return to communitarian values, a (conservative) shared ethos and understanding of the rules. Second, conservative aesthetic critics (I'm thinking largely of Roger Kimball of the New Criterion here) bemoan the loss of the "creative individual" whose originality and vision transcend time and touch eternal values. This viewpoint is surely opposed to mass/identitarian/subjectively decentered art.

It should be apparent that it's difficult to reconcile the (1) social and (2) artistic aspects of this problem, and I would say that conservatism and classical Liberalism in general also share in it. Just to show an instance of this paradox at work, check out today's New York Times for an interesting article about "book packagers." The idea is that in order to maximize marketability and sales, a tween-lit publishing company takes a stock set of character types and situations, jumbles them up a bit in an endless stream of tokens of the same type, and finds authors to flesh out the bare-bones formula. The result is hundreds of pre-fab best-sellers such as the "Clique," "A-List," and "Gossip Girls" series.

My guess is that Viswanathan's book is not so distinguishable from this pool. (The publishers liked the fact that she was Indian, though--an untapped market!) You could probably find similarities between any number of them, but Viswanathan is young, talented, and a Harvard student, so the human interest potential is greater. If you read the Times article, you see how she was pressured by the book packager, Alloy, to cut the number of the heroine's friends down to 3 from 4, and to add the closing graduation speech scene, making the book even more similar to McCafferty's than before. So if Straka wants to criticize Viswanathan, perhaps he should look to the corporations who power the engine of the industry, who demand complete homogeneity and sameness at every turn in order to ensure the material prosperity of the individual. Then we'll see where the "creative genius" goes!