Earlier this week, I read an AP story about a Harvard sophmore who received a $500,000 contract for two books.

Viswanathan seems like any other 19-year-old at Harvard: She’s smart, worldly and confident, but still has teenage idiosyncrasies, occasionally biting her lower lip, fidgeting in her chair and talking too fast when she’s excited.

Now it appears that lip-biting might have been rooted in more pressing concerns:

Student’s Novel Faces Plagiarism Controversy

Here is a pdf (requires Acrobat Reader) of the offending 45 Passages.

I’m coming to this late, but Walter Kirn, a favorite of mine, has a serialized novel in progress at Slate.com entitled The Unbinding.

Slate’s culture editor Megan O’Rourke has this to say:

While novels have been serialized in mainstream online publications before, this is the first time a prominent novelist has published a genuine Net Novel—one that takes advantage of, and draws inspiration from, the capacities of the Internet.

Click here for the complete introduction to the project, and make sure to click on the archive to catch up.

Ali Smith’s The Accidental edges out Sam Lipsyte’s Home Land by a slim, somewhat begrudging margin.

Full recap of matches available here.

I’ve been eager to write about Zadie Smith’s On Beauty since finishing it a few weeks ago. But with all the talk of her homage to E.M. Forster’s Howard’s End, (she cribs the first line and quite a few plot points from the novel) it didn’t seem right to talk about one without having caught up with the other. So I picked up a four dollar paperback and set to work.

Both books focus on the intersection of two families in a very specific milieu. In Howard’s End it’s the upstart Schlegels and the bourgeois Wilcoxes crossing between urban and rural England. Smith chooses an east coast liberal arts college to set the liberal American Belseys against the conservative British Kipps.

Smith’s talent still seems precocious, even after three books. It’s enjoyable to read her prose. She’s clever, entertaining and is a sure hand at character depiction.
And yet she was ousted from The Morning News’ Tournament of Books – twice! Their critics’ reception to the novel mirrored mine.  Karl Iagnemma compared it to “a cross-country road trip with an extremely smart but crushingly talkative acquaintance.”
It’s bold, and possibly foolish, to force a comparison with a classic novel. Howard’s End didn’t bowl me over. But reading Forster, I sensed the author’s control and purpose on every page. With Smith it’s a joyful carom from one scene to another but in the end it’s hard to say what the book has to do with beauty or academia, cross-Atlantic relations or high and low culture. Smith toys with all these themes, but they never connect in a compelling way.

A novel should never lecture. Instead, it should the reader a thematic compass point for orientation, and then set them free to explore the story by that light. Ugh! I keep retyping the previous sentence to better explain what I mean, and get more and more pretentious with each attempt. For me, reading Forster and Smith side by side was a reminder that great books cohere in ways that good books don’t and that’s only obvious in the reading of them.