Like the character in her novel, Viswanathan is "an Indian-American girl who got good grades, from New Jersey, who wanted to go to an Ivy League school." It was only to be expected, then, that Viswanathan's, yes, Range Rover-driving neurosurgeon father and obstetrician-turned-stay-at-home-mother signed their only child up with IvyWise. This admissions counseling service will, for a fee -- the platinum package will set you back $30,000 -- "take all the raw material and help you put it together in the way that an admissions officer is going to be most impressed by," as Viswanathan explained. . .
It was, unsurprisingly, IvyWise founder Katherine Cohen (Brown '89; Yale PhD '97) who got Viswanathan into the book-writing business. Cohen (author, "Rock Hard Apps: How to Write a Killer College Application") wondered why Viswanathan hadn't listed her novel-in-progress on her résumé. You can almost see her application-glazed eyes lighting up: Okay, here's our pitch: "Not just another high school newspaper editor-in-chief, Indian American science nerd!"
Which is where the next round of packaging comes in. Cohen sent Viswanathan's work to her own agent, who hooked up the teenager with Alloy Entertainment, a book packager (yes, this is really a business) that specializes in churning out teen-lit like so many Moschino miniskirts. Deeming her original concept too dark, Alloy "helped Kaavya conceptualize and plot the book," according to the company president.
It's no excuse, but with all this third-party positioning, is it any wonder that a person -- especially a teenage person -- could forget (or ignore) the fact that some of the writing in her book is not actually hers? How easy it is for authenticity to be obscured in a world in which hired help packages preschool applications, in which the line between a real relationship with an adult and strategic sucking up is blurred.
This has been my intention all along. We cannot expect a 19 year-old, who's been pushed along in a high-pressure environment (or anything other than an "emancipated minor" environment) to differentiate between mentorship and "sucking up"...and to understand when they've been helped along just a bit more than their less-than-affluent and much-harder working counterparts...
The Post piece also talks about "book packagers"--another insidious layer of literary pimping--which is explained quite well by Steve Leigh (thanks Terry.)
But let's also take a look at the issue of race and ethnicity that is slightly touched upon in the Post piece: Perhaps, what this incident might also achieve is the trashing of an insidious stereotype that's been percolating since the arrival of so many Indian immigrants some 25 years ago--that many are special, and smarter than most Americans. The attitude wasn't necessarily promulgated by the new immigrants themselves--even though many initial immigrants were doctors and computer geeks--but got stirred up in an American social climate that was moving towards an excess of political correctness spurred on by a "white guilt." That old-fashioned white guilt seemed to want to offer a whole bunch of mea culpas for past immigrant abuses by treating new immigrant groups with a bit of deference. Current guilt over the sins of the past, though, ended up not really quelling any anti-immigrant sentiment--and there was lots of that--it only managed to create a very trendy, highly marketable, ethnicity...
And, in part, it is that trendy ethnicity that, once a blessing, is now a bit of a bane for Ms. Viswanathan...thanks to some insidious, and expert, activities that, when calling it what it is, amount to a whole lot of down-and-dirty pimping...
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