Writers Allude, Wheras Plagiarists Copy

To the editors:



I am writing to refute the arguments of Charles Drummond (“Girl Interrupted,” comment, April 26). Kaavya Viswanathan, in her debut novel, has not taken “few plot points and a borrowed phrase every 10 pages,” but something much more egregious than that. She has taken the plot, prose, and language from another novel and with no reinvention whatsoever tried to pass them off as her own.

Yes, I acknowledge that we live in a super-competitive age, but there are limits to everything. Let’s not forget the new robber barons that have been sentenced and put away for stealing millions from Enron, WorldCom, and other corporations.

Great authors make allusions. Ms. Austen did not lift the very language of Anne Radcliffe’s “Mysteries of Udolpho” to write her “Northanger Abbey.” She made allusions to that text and to its gothic conventions. Shakespeare’s texts play with ancient myth and the works of Ovid, but Shakespeare took those ideas and constructions much further. It takes knowledge to allude, and invention to create, but it takes no imagination whatsoever to plagiarize and copy.

This case just goes to show that anyone can scribble a novel if they give it a go, but without scruples, invention, or creativity, those scribbles do not make one a writer.



PATRICK LOUIS

Providence, R.I.

April 29, 2006