There was much articulate reaction to my essay last week vaguely -- and many thought unfairly -- linking the scandal over Kaavya Viswanathan’s How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life with the success of Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner.
(I asserted that the latter, though by no means a work of plagiarism, was also a composite effort of movie-treatment- conscious script doctors.)
A couple of the responses were published as letters to Beyond Chron. Others came to me directly. Many of the latter were generated by a link from an interesting Chicago-based site, bookslut.com.
“Kite Bummer” met two basic objections. The first was well put in a private email from a friend: “I don't see, frankly, why heavy editing is remotely connected with the plagiarism incident. The Waste Land, for example, was heavily edited for T.S. Elliott by Ezra Pound.”
The other objection was encapsulated in Beyond Chron reader Jake Seliger’s letter to the editor, which argued, “I'm sure I won't be the only one to point to Joseph Conrad, now widely considered an important harbinger of modernism, who didn't learn English until he was about 17. Given the astonishing literary feats some people perform, Muchnick shouldn't make accusations or even insinuations about a novel's authenticity without having more than just a hunch.”
I think these critics, like me, make only half a point.
A comparison of ultra-literary poetic edits by Ezra Pound with the wholesale premise-shifting and rewriting reported in The New York Times’ backgrounder on The Kite Runner is at best inexact. While I openly acknowledge that we don’t know the extent of the editorial assistance Hosseini received and whether there would be a consensus that it crossed the line, I suggest that the $500,000 advance for an unknown, the tasteless tub-thumping in The Times by Riverhead Books’ in-house talent (unaccompanied by the author’s own voice), and the overall foul smell emanating these days from the publishing industry -- matching that of government, press, and other institutions -- combine to make the provenance of Kite Runner verbiage a fit topic for discussion in polite company.
With regard to Joseph Conrad, the authenticity of Heart of Darkness, juxtaposed with the seeming artificiality of the last half or third of The Kite Runner, is just what I’d hoped readers would think about a little deeper.
“Authenticity” and “seeming artificiality” according to whom, you ask? Why, according to me, of course -- this was an opinion piece. The act of reading, especially the reading of fiction, is prima facie subjective. Our major literary publishing houses -- the Little, Browns and the Riverheads and their brethren -- appear quite proud of how they’ve transformed themselves into envelope-pushing adjuncts of Hollywood. They therefore have earned a new level of scrutiny that needn’t be restricted to criminal-statutory standards.
(I point out that in another era people wondered whether Harper Lee, or her childhood pal Truman Capote, was the real author of the wonderful To Kill a Mockingbird. This speculation was fueled by Lee’s never having published again. But recent discovery of new Capote correspondence confirms that Lee, and Lee alone, wrote the book.)
I repeat: Crass publishers can’t have it both ways. Careers there are built on touting the ghost in the machine. If they want to disclose more about the process behind The Kite Runner, and possibly shoot down my theory, I’m all for it. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee can’t issue fundraising letters hyping its influence in Washington -- and then turn around and play the anti-Semitism card whenever critics muse about the “Israel lobby.” Similarly, it’s the height of hypocrisy for the packaging -- excuse me, the publishing -- industry to specialize in creating instant superstars and then claim that the rest of us don’t have the right to examine the dirt under its fingernails. As the subtitle of my article, “Why Literary Fiction Needs Steroid Testing,” suggested, we live in an era when anabolic enhancement is more than a metaphor.
Khaled Hosseini himself is a big boy who can defend himself. I say this not just because the riches from The Kite Runner give him all the insulation he needs, but also because, by all accounts, he is a photogenic and charismatic spokesperson for his own work. Asked at book readings whether his novel will harm relations with the Muslim world, he has responded, “Five minutes of MTV do more damage than my book ever could.”