why not plagiariaze the good stuff?

I’ve been avoiding writing about the 19-year Harvard student and author Kaavya Viswanathan, who Got a Big Advance, Got Help with a Concept, and Got Nailed for Copying Someone Else’s Bad Writing.

#41: I wanted to change the subject because I did not like the fact that Bridget of all people had just psychoanalyzed me with such accuracy. McCafferty, Sloppy Firsts (Three Rivers, 2001), page 301

I squirmed, uncomfortable at being so accurately psychoanalyzed, and by Sean, of all people.
Viswanathan, How Opal Mehta…Got a Life (Little Brown, 2006), page 171

#43: “‘Omigod!’” shrieked Sara, taking a pink tube top emblazoned with a glittery Playboy bunny out of her shopping bag.”
McCafferty, Sloppy Firsts (Three Rivers, 2001), pg. 68

“…buy me a pink tube top emblazoned with a glittery Playboy bunny.”
Viswanathan, How Opal Mehta…Got a Life (Little Brown, 2006), pg. 51

For one thing, GalleyCat has been all over it from every angle (examples above are cited by GalleyCat; all 45 examples can be found on this PDF at PublishersMarketplace). For another, as reported by the New York Observer, this was an accident waiting to happen.

Then I read the asinine remarks from Sara Nelson, head honcho of the trade magazine Publishers Weekly:

I don’t know and, to tell you the truth, I don’t particularly care if Kaavya Viswanathan did or did not plagiarize YA author Megan McCafferty in her now-controversial debut novel, How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life.

It doesn’t really matter much to me whether this alleged plagiarism was conscious or un-, even now that Little, Brown has withdrawn the book, clearly under pressure from Random House, McCafferty’s publisher.What does concern me, though, is what this says about the publishing process, and about how and why books get bought and sold….

We’ve known for years that publishers, probably including Little, Brown, have long employed freelance editors and “book doctors,” of which packagers are just an institutional version. But Little, Brown has to resort to this? Realizing that a major house is willing to pay major money for a book that executives knew was going to require major work smacks of something majorly disturbing. It suggests that even the most well-bred publishing houses are not as desperate to find promising writers and great novels as they are to find attractive authors (preferably with interesting backstories) with whom they can match up test-marketed, packaged stories. And then they can take all the credit.

These remarks suggest Ms. Nelson has been living under a rock. Or that she just loves the taste of that Kool-Aid.

Granted, it’s a rival publication, but still… doesn’t she read the New York Times Book Review?