‘When you are seventeen you aren’t really serious,’ wrote Arthur Rimbaud when he was 16. For the precocious French poet, the line suggested an excuse as well as a luxury that is provided only to the youth. That line should also provide 19-year-old Kaavya Viswanathan some comfort after she was outed this week as a ‘plagiarist’. Ms Viswanathan’s book How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life had been feted, till the other day, as the new Bridget Jones’s Diary -- not quite Anna Karenina but a publishing, rather than a literary, sensation nonetheless. As is wont with the aesthetics of our times, Ms Viswanathan became the toast -- and envy -- of many a town when the news that the then 17-year-old had signed a $ 500,000 two-novel contract became her book’s unofficial blurb. Now, this news of Ms Viswanathan having ‘internalised’ (that’s ‘unconscious copying’ for those who aren’t post-Freudians) from two books of American writer Megan McCafferty is being trumpeted as the let down of the year.
Without going into the nitty-gritty of what constitutes plagiarism and what doesn’t, nicking lines shows lack of authorial maturity rather than thievery. But that’s the occupational hazard that an author must pay for writing formulaic writing as lapped up by conveyor-belt publishing houses. Does that sound too self-righteous and ‘we told you so’? It shouldn’t. Because when you’re an editorial writer commenting about a bestselling teenaged author, plagiarist or not, you can’t afford to be really serious.