Jamaica Kincaid, Writer, Takes Kaavya Viswanathan, Plagiarist, Under Wing
Award-winning novelist and memoirist Jamaica Kincaid, who couldn't countenance working for a New Yorker that had anything to do with Roseanne Barr, is now in a better place: visiting professor at Harvard. But what sort of undergrad does she hang with? According to our English Department sources up in Cambridge (don't laugh), Kincaid, author of Lucy and A Small Place, has agreed to spend the next academic year advising the senior thesis of Kaavya Viswanathan, non-author of How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life. For the benefit of whatever Harvard disciplinary committee overlooks creative-writing theses, let's get the obvious festivities started:
Opal Mehta:
I remembered shooting rockets made of coconut leaves off the rooftop terrace, and watching the beady-eyed green-and-yellow lizards that scuttled over the putty-colored walls after a hard rain. I remembered cold baths from a bucket with a plastic dipper, and sweet, oily badam halva from the nearby Chola hotel.
A Small Place (1988):
Oh, but by now you are tired of all this looking, and you want to reach your destination—your hotel, your room. You long to refresh yourself; you long to eat some nice lobster, some nice local food. You take a bath, you brush your teeth.
Opal Mehta:
I never thought I would say this, but I was worried about my parents. They had officially lost it.
The Autobiography of My Mother (1995):
We were never to trust each other. This was like a motto repeated to us by out parents...
You get the idea—it's a game for players of all ages! Whoever finds the next real plagiarism wins. Oh, schandafreunde chasing entitlement chasing schandafreunde: the gift that keeps on giving.