Mehta Fiction -- village voice > books > by Ed Park
ggl [News results for opal mehta -today's top stories:11 hrs ago] - 1st to say 'mehta fiction'? -
good article,very good even. ah, "Ed Park is the editor of VLS."

Parts I and IV frame the discussion of Viswanathan's plagiary, telling the experience of a HS litmag editor (Ed Park) who published what turned out to be lifted writing.

II. In Kaavya Viswanathan's debut novel, How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life, the narrator, a well-to-do second-generation Indian American high school senior, cold-bloodedly schemes to get into Harvard—where not coincidentally Viswanathan is currently a sophomore. Opal's plan, triggered by a disastrous campus interview ("Tell me about your best friends" sends her into a panic) and developed by her Cantab-crazed parents, tenuously transforms the brainy, overextended grind into a va-va-voom member of the exclusive Haute Bitchez.
The fact that Opal misconstrues the Harvard dean's advice to "find some balance" as Unleash your inner conspicuous consumer and align yourself with the most hateful people in your class is just one of the novel's troubling spots. But the book, as we all know, has run into problems beyond issues of literary merit. (Indeed, it met with some mystifyingly positive notices, including a New York Times feature on Viswanathan's charmed life.) The Harvard Crimson made a convincing case that several passages in Opal strongly resemble Sloppy Firsts (2001) and Second Helpings (2003), two novels by Megan McCafferty. Subsequent discoveries turned Meg Cabot, Salman Rushdie, and others into instant precursors. And book packager Alloy Entertainment's involvement in Opal's genesis ratcheted up the Who wrote what? level. On April 27 Little, Brown recalled Opal, as if it were an SUV that tends to flip over when making sharp lefts. Its shelf life was under a month.
Forbidden, silenced, the novel now becomes readable, as gripping as a mystery. The bizarre tonal changes suddenly make sense: The whole thing isn't a cloying fantasy of having it all, but the nightmare of answered prayers. Paragraphs dripping with entitlement conceal not only purloined prose, but also clues that sound, chillingly, like a cry for help. ...

III. On his blog, Blink author Malcolm Gladwell essentially tells Kaavya cavilers to get over it already, that "calling this plagiarism is the equivalent of crying 'copy' in a crowded Kinkos [sic]." "It is worth reading, I think, the actual passages that Viswanathan is supposed to have taken from McCafferty," he writes, with plummy condescension. "Let's just say this isn't the first twenty lines of Paradise Lost." (My gut tells me Blink isn't, either.)
It is worth reading, I think, the actual books from which Viswanathan stole —worth paying attention to the work of the primary victim in this whole affair. The best place to start, if you are not currently a teenage girl, is the new Charmed Thirds (published last month), which follows heroine Jessica Darling through her years at Columbia. As with its two predecessors, Thirds consists largely of Jessica's diary entries, with occasional letters to her best friend, Hope, who is, perversely, offstage for all but a few paragraphs of the entire trilogy (her family moves to Tennessee before the start of Sloppy Firsts). It's a strange and affecting literary device, built of silence—she's like Jessica's superego or shrink.
Though ostensibly part of the same genre—that intersection of young-adult and chick lit—McCafferty's novels couldn't be more different from their infamous imitator. It's instantly clear that these books actually have a heartbeat. Jessica is smart, cynical, confused, and genuinely funny. (At times she recalls Bridget Jones, but McCafferty wisely avoids farce.)
Viswanathan obviously couldn't have cribbed from Charmed Thirds, but the book comments on the controversy anyway. In the most uncanny line, Jessica's former classmate, Hyacinth Wallace, says, "They should have a law against seventeen-year-olds publishing novels." (Viswanathan landed her book deal at 17.)