Present Imperfect

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

November 29, 2006

Once upon a midday dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary, over many a quaint and curious online news item of thieving lore...

Since Stephen Ambrose was exposed for heisting whole passages from fellow historians way back in 2002, online journalists and readers alike have taken perverse pleasure in watching The Great and Powerful Bestselling Author go the way of the junior high stoner with a penchant for copying pages of the Encyclopedia Britannica to pad book reports.

This week, British novelist Ian McEwan was accused of plagiarizing Lucilla Andrews, a WWII nurse from whose memoirs McEwan took notes and inspiration for his novel "Atonement."

Last spring, Harvard student Kaavya Viswanathan was "was very surprised and upset" when she learned that her novel, "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life" borrowed quite heavily from Megan McCafferty's "Sloppy Firsts" and "Second Helpings."

Can I get a witness?:

Ms. McCafferty writes: "Though I used to see him sometimes at Hope's house, Marcus and I had never, ever acknowledged each other's existence before. So I froze, not knowing whether I should (a) laugh, (b) say something, or (c) ignore him and keep on walking. I chose a brilliant combo of (a) and (b)."

Ms. Viswanathan writes: "Though I had been to school with him for the last three years, Sean Whalen and I had never acknowledged each other's existence before. I froze, unsure of (a) what he was talking about, or (b) what I was supposed to do about it. I stared at him."

My personal opinion? Ambrose is an intentional plagiarist who got drunk on the power of prolificacy. No one who puts out eight books in five years can possibly keep track of what's his and what's not. Viswanathan is an unintentional plagiarist who internalized another writer's work and wound up unintentionally "remembering" the work as her own. And McEwan's not a plagiarist at all, but a Booker Prize-winning novelist who acknowledged his source — a source who, when presented with the plagiarism charge, responded with "I don't give a damn."

But my opinion doesn't matter. What matters is the grand schadenfreude of it all. It's what makes us read gut-wrenching novels like "Atonement" in the first place. We like to watch other people — whether they be fictional or very real — suffer. Train wrecks, congressional page scandals, the "Heroin Twins" on Dr. Phil (or, let's face it, Dr. Phil full stop), novelists who get caught with their pens down...it's all about feeling smarter or luckier or marginally less horrible than someone else.

In cases of well-publicized plagiarism, well, that's like hitting the mother lode of false intellectual superiority: We all want to feel smarter than a smart person, and plagiarism makes smart people look really dumb.