Heavy Lifting

Following up on my post the other day about plagiarism, it’s worth noting that the publisher of young novelist Kaavya Viswanathan is pulling her book for good:

The announcement was made on the same day that new allegations of plagiarism were reported about Kaavya Viswanathan’s novel, How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life, including one report that she had copied from famed author Salman Rushdie.

Rushdie himself weighed in with an interesting thought:

[S]peaking on India’s CNN-IBN news channel, Rushdie, who was also born in India, said similarities between the books could not have been accidental.

He said: “The passages are too many and the similarities are too extensive. And I’m sorry that this young girl, pushed by the needs of a publishing machine and, no doubt, by her own ambition, should have fallen into this trap so early in her career.”

I say it’s “interesting” because Rushdie acknowledges something fundamental to the scandal: Viswanathan wasn’t the only player here. Just as James Frey’s editor knew he’d originally submitted his “memoir” as a novel, so the people who edited and helped produce Viswanathan’s book surely knew that this young woman was in over her head.

But here’s the question that I haven’t heard asked:

Why does anyone think that a 19-year-old can write publishable fiction? I know it’s happened a handful of times — the first author who comes to mind is Bret Easton Ellis, who published Less than Zero when he was 21. That means he wrote it when he was 19 or 20. It’s one of those books that transcends criticism, since it’s a train-wreck story about essentially amoral characters, and as such it’s hard to stop reading it once you start. Maybe now it’d be easy to put down, but when it first came out, in 1985, it seemed to be a new type of book about a new type of world that most of us didn’t know existed.

But, really, Ellis was sui generis; yes, he had a grasp of the mid-’80s zeitgeist, and knew how to get readers’ attention (not to mention the media’s), but he wasn’t exactly destined for literary greatness.

I remember thinking at the time how bizarre it was that someone that age could write an entire book, much less something publishable, much less something that would become a pop-cultural touchstone. I could barely finish term papers as a teenager, and the most charitable word you could use to describe the fiction I wrote back then was “amateurish.” (The uncharitable words start with “horrible” and descend quickly from there.)

That’s why I make my living writing about health and fitness, which worked out fine for me.

What troubles me is the idea that competent, professional writing is something young people should plausibly be able to do. I don’t want to get into a rant about age discrimination in Hollywood, but it’s well-accepted that younger writers are universally preferred over older ones.

But in most of those cases, it’s writers in their 20s and early 30s, often graduates from film schools, Ivy League colleges, or the top writing programs who are getting the gigs over writers in their 40s or 50s. We aren’t talking about teenagers; these are men and women who are ambitious and talented and willing to put up with just about any amount of crap to get ahead. (And, based on what I’ve heard from writers lucky enough to get those jobs, the crap gets deeper than anyone expects going in.)

Teenagers, though, are a different species from young but well-trained writers. They may be old enough to be Olympic gymnastics champions or actors or bloggers, but writing competent, book-length fiction is something entirely different, something that almost always takes not just life experience, but some seasoning as a writer trying to record those life experiences.

A transcendently talented writer like F. Scott Fitzgerald might figure it out early in his career, and a sensationalist like Bret Ellis might stumble on the secret sauce, but it’s such a fluke when it happens that we should all be skeptical. Some things in life just can’t be rushed.

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