Literary scandal speaks volumes

PARENTS are worried; pundits are alarmed; publishers -- on their good days -- are anxious and on the others, hysterical. The cause of their apprehension is the same: A declining number of American young people read books for pleasure, or at all.

Cut through the pro forma moralizing, discount for schadenfreude, and the literary scandal du jour suggests something important about why fewer and fewer kids curl up with a good book.

In this case, the scandal involves a 19-year-old Harvard freshman named Kaavya Viswanathan, whose first novel earned her a two-book, $500,000 contract with Little, Brown & Co., a first printing of 100,000 copies and a film deal. This week, it emerged that the book, “How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life,” contained as many as 40 passages plagiarized from two novels by Megan McCafferty, an established writer of so-called young adult fiction.

At midweek, Viswanathan told the New York Times that she had read McCafferty’s books but that any borrowing was the unintended consequence of her photographic memory. (Funny how blurry the mental picture of a title page can be -- under certain circumstances.) After saying he had no intention of withdrawing the young writer’s novel, the publisher, Michael Pietsch, changed his mind and Thursday pulled the book from the shelves. (Viswanathan had better hope he’s a little firmer in his promise not to sue her for breach of contract. Who needs that on top of tuition?)

Actually, Viswanathan doesn’t have a contract with Little, Brown, and that’s where this minor-key morality play begins to suggest something more than squalor as usual. Both the contract and the copyright to “Opal Mehta” are in the name of a highly successful “book packaging” company called Alloy Entertainment. It creates characters and plots, then finds writers to execute them and provides editing and design to create ... “a package.”

Within the limited horizons of contemporary publishing, it works. Alloy has created many financially successful series, especially for girls, and the first-, fifth- and ninth-ranked books on this week’s New York Times list of the bestselling paperbacks for children are the products of what that paper calls, without hint of irony, “a ‘tween-lit hit factory.”

It’s interesting that the sequence that put Viswanathan’s loot -- which is what a theft yields -- in bookstores began when her parents hired a private college counselor from a firm called IvyWise, which packages applicants for prestigious colleges. Impressed by Viswanathan’s writing, the counselor put her in touch with her own agent, who hooked her up with the hit factory, which sold the package to Little, Brown. (As a society increasingly organized around little more than appetites, we’re probably too far down the road toward the commoditization of everything to bemoan the treatment of personas and literature as packaged goods.)

In fact, packaging of a certain sort isn’t even a new publishing phenomenon. Some of the last century’s best-loved fictional series for children -- including the Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, the Bobbsey Twins, Tom Swift and the Rover Boys -- were the product of Edward Stratemeyer’s euphonious syndicate. There never was a Franklin W. Dixon or Carolyn Keene, both pseudonyms Stratemeyer owned. He jotted down the books’ plots and then farmed them out to ghost writers, who worked on contract.

What is new is the way the packaging operations dovetail so neatly with the values of the sprawling corporations that now control the publication of most books in America. It can come as no shock to anyone that they believe in marketing and the bottom line over and above everything else. When it comes to books for young readers, the result -- in the overwhelming majority of cases -- is a focus-group-driven literature of solipsism, which most children and adolescents ignore as bleak and inauthentic, despite all its calculated relevance.

What this unfortunately driven young woman’s rather sad little story suggests is that one of the major reasons other young people don’t read books is that most of the stuff published for children and adolescents is abysmal, self-regarding trash. Part of the fault rests with the packagers such as Alloy and in the way they do business. A larger part of the problem stems from publishers’ misguided belief that kids want to read about people just like themselves, living lives just like their lives.

Dead wrong.

If these publishers looked to their own childhood memories rather than a spreadsheet, they’d recall that young readers, more than any others, want to be transported and shown not just other lives but whole worlds utterly different from their own. Witness the wild popularity of fantasy and science fiction among the very same kids who display the very same sensibility in their choice of video games. What could be more dispiriting than going into your room in search of escape, solace or pleasure, opening a book and reading a story about someone just like you hemmed in by the same four walls?

The conditions that have alienated so many young people from reading are hardly unique to publishing. They’re common to other forms of entertainment and news media, where the creativity and idealism of the founding personalities have been subsumed by corporate ownership. It happened long ago in the film industry, and the tormented director or abused screenwriter is now virtually a cultural archetype. It has happened to all but a handful of the country’s broadcasters and newspapers.

At a gathering of newspaper editors in Seattle this week, John Carroll, The Times’ former editor, summed up what has occurred during the transition from private ownership to corporate management. He said decisions are increasingly dictated -- as the making of films and the publishing of books are -- by the needs of investment funds. “We have seen a narrowing of the purpose of the newspaper in the eyes of its owner,” Carroll said. “Under the old local owners, a newspaper’s capacity for making money was only part of its value. Today, it is everything.”

Whether you’re talking about books, films or newspapers -- as it turns out -- much flows from that decisive moment when “the business” passes from the hands of people who have found a way to make a living doing something they love and into the hands of folks who only love making a living. Some of what results is truly noxious, some is distasteful, most is merely dreary. The majority of books aimed at today’s young people fall into this last category.

It’s hard to blame readers of any age for voting with their feet when they see what’s seeping toward them and realize they’re about to be ankle deep in bilge.