I recently wrote about plagiarism, then about the fuzzy line between homage and appropriation, two topics that seem to be in the air lately. Over at Slate, Jack Shafer weighs in on Ian McEwan’s appropriation of several passages from Lucilla Andrews’ No Time for Romance (1977) for his best-selling Atonement (2001).

Shafer’s link-heavy piece is a great resource for this discussion. McEwan doesn’t deny what he did–in fact, he acknowledged Andrews in the author’s note at the end of the book–and a host of heavy hitters has rushed to his defense. Writes Shafer:

The defense goes like this: He’s a novelist, operating in a world of make-believe, and storytellers have always been allowed to pilfer and pinch from other writers with impunity. Coleridge lifted from the Germans. Shakespeare ripped off everybody. And, they say, it’s not like McEwan took words from another novel: He took a bit of personal history from a memoir, mashed it up with his imagination, to create his great book.

Shafer puts the argument to the test by examining the passages side by side. He concludes:

I detect no mash-up here, no adding of value, and no “creative use,” to quote Pynchon’s generous letter of support. McEwan helps himself to Andrews’ words as if they first appeared on the planet in one of his rough drafts. To protest, as he does, that her memoir served as “research” is a lie. McEwan rewrote Andrews’ vivid copy and called it his own. The laugh of larceny is that the Booker Prize-winner didn’t even improve it.

Frankly, I like the sound of the defense. If I were writing a novel about a particular time and place, especially one I was unfamiliar with, I imagine I’d turn to a lot of sources, including histories, memoirs, articles–and even novels–to give myself a well-rounded sense of things. And in reconstituting that torrent of information into a ream’s worth of manuscript, it seems quite possible to me that a few sentences or phrases might accidentally find their way in along with the facts.

Thinking of it like that, to judge McEwan on 335 words of a 448-page novel seems almost ludicrous. It’s like looking at an architect’s building and saying, “That is a stunningly original work, except for the part over that window on the first floor, which you’ve copied from someone else. That ruins everything.”

True, a building ornament is not the same thing as a sentence–there are standard forms for windows, and there is no standard form (other than subject-predicate) for a sentence. And when exact or near-exact phrases appear in two works, we have to assume they’ve been copied from one into the other. And if they were copied, doesn’t that prove intent?

With a writer like McEwan, I think it implies carelessness, not deviousness. Maybe Shafer is right and McEwan didn’t really improve on the original prose–but does he think that McEwan couldn’t have improved upon it had he given it real thought? Or that a writer of his stature would feel he had something to gain by taking the words? A unknown writer who took from McEwan might feel that, if no one noticed the theft, McEwan’s words would lend heft to otherwise undistinguished prose. But McEwan has done all right for himself, I think, without Andrews. And it’s worth noting that in his author’s note he uses the word “indebted”–which almost implies acknowledging that he took something.

I like the idea that fiction writers can have free hands with the facts, that if they see a new angle in someone else’s story they’re free to riff on it. I also think that stealing actual words is, if intentional, sad and petty (and unfortunate if unintentional). But if it’s a petty crime, then the punishment should fit the crime. Shafer notes somewhat sadly that plagiarism doesn’t destroy reputations, but I’m not sure it should. (A whole chapter stolen, or a whole book, would of course be a different matter.)

Because each case of theft or borrowing has its own nuances, it’s impossible to say, even if it were possible to say such things, what is acceptable or not in all circumstances. But Atonement strikes me as a poor test case of anything, given that McEwan at least acknowledged his source. If he was truly trying to pass her words off as his own, that would have been a terrible way to hide the theft.

Okay, so those reported sales of O. J. Simpson’s If I Did It didn’t actually happen. From Galleycat: 

The mystery surrounding Bookscan’s report of 100 copies of OJ Simpson’s canceled “confession” IF I DID IT sold during the week ending December 3 has been solved. According to HarperCollins spokeswoman Erin Crum, those “sales” were in fact pre-orders that a single retail account had neglected to delete from their system.

The sales were as hypothetical as his confession, which means that–wait a minute. Oh my god. What if this is some kind of a conspiratorial cover-up?

This is the last item I’m going to post on this tiresome brouhaha.

(Unless something really interesting happens, and then I’m sure I won’t be able to help myself.)

Galleycat reports that, surprise, surprise, some copies of O. J. Simpson’s If I Did It slipped through the dragnet:

When the publication of OJ Simpson’s now beyond-infamous “confession” IF I DID IT was canceled late last month, HarperCollins spokeswoman Erin Crum told the Associated Press that “some copies had already been shipped to stores but would be recalled, and all copies would be destroyed.” Looks like the definition of “all” is somewhat fuzzy because according to Nielsen Bookscan numbers released earlier today, 100 copies of IF I DID IT sold across the country in the week ending December 3. As one tipster put it, “not only are copies leaking out, but some bookstores are actually selling them.”

But, yes, it could have been much worse:

That some copies sold instead of going back to HarperCollins’ warehouse for pulping is to be expected - and perhaps the real surprise is that so few leaked out.

Stay tuned for reports of exorbitant black-market prices….

From the Los Angeles Times:

Merle Rubin, a book critic who was a regular contributor to the Los Angeles Times as well as the Wall Street Journal, Washington Times and Christian Science Monitor, has died. She was 57.

…

It is rare for a book critic to support herself as a freelancer. The profession is notorious for long hours and low pay, but it seemed to agree with Rubin.

“It is a way of making a literary life,” Times Book Editor David Ulin said of Rubin’s career. “The intellectual benefits are there.”

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For those of you going through award-news withdrawal, you’ll be pleased to learn that Uzodinma Iweala has won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for his first novel, Beasts of No Nation. From The Guardian:

Beasts of No Nation is a first novel by Uzodinma Iweala who, at 23 years old, is one of the youngest winners of the prize for young writers, which has an upper age limit of 35 years.

Previous award winners include V. S. Naipaul, Angela Carter, Jeanette Winterson, David Mitchell, and Zadie Smith, so Iweala is in good company. And his tale, about a child soldier in an unnamed West African country, couldn’t be more timely. The Guardian article notes that as many as 300,000 children may currently be fighting as soldiers.

In her starred Booklist review, Gillian Engberg writes:

Readers will come away feeling shattered by this haunting, original story.

Oh, heck, here’s the whole review:

“I am not bad boy. I am not bad boy. I am soldier and soldier is not bad if he is killing.” Set in an unnamed West African country, Iweala’s first novel shows civil war from a child’s viewpoint. After his mother and sister escape and his father is killed, the traumatized young narrator is discovered by guerrilla fighters. Frightened and alone, he joins the men, becoming a soldier in an impoverished army of terror headed by a charismatic and treacherous leader who tells his young followers that killing “is like falling in love. You cannot be thinking about it.” Writing in the boy’s West African English, Iweala distills his story to the most urgent and visceral atrocities, and the scenes of bloodshed and rape are made more excruciating by the lyrical, rhythmic language. In the narrator’s memories of village life, biblical stories, and creation myths, Iweala explores the mutable separation between human and beast and a child’s struggle to rediscover his own humanity after war: “I am some sort of beast or devil,” the boy says, “But I am also having mother once, and she is loving me.” Readers will come away feeling shattered by this haunting, original story. – Gillian Engberg

The Sunday before last, the Chicago Tribune’s critics offered a number of critical reversals–”revisions and reassessments” of works they’d previously panned or praised. It’s a topic I’d been meaning to write about myself, and I’d been mulling it over for a few days when I stumbled across the Eggers vs. Eggers controversy–Eggers’ striking change of heart regarding David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. Second thoughts seem to be on our minds as we approach the end of the year.

(Unfortunately, the Trib doesn’t have an in-house book critic, so we were left to wonder if they stood by their original review of Jest.)

I’ve written before about how it can be suprisingly hard to form an opinion in the first place, so it should come as no surprise that those opinions can change. Why is it hard to form an opinion? If that sounds ludicrous, let me explain: it’s not that I don’t know whether I like a book or not. It’s just that it can be difficult to determine the degree to which I like or dislike it, or where it fits into the author’s previous work, or how it matches up against similar works in the world at large. Adult Books Editor Brad Hooper tells reviewers to trust their guts–and he’s right–but sometimes it’s hard to hear what my gut is saying. Ever tried to order off a menu when you’re starving?

I work on deadline and I read a lot of books. (Not nearly as many as some of my colleagues, but probably more than the average parent of two.) I finish one and I pull the next one off the top of the stack. Sometimes I read late into the night. Sometimes I wake up four times in the middle of the night to settle down a bright-eyed eight-month-old and then find myself finishing the review the next morning with just minutes to spare.

In his reconsideration of U2’s Achtung Baby, Greg Kot writes:

An editor once said writing a review on deadline is like performing a jazz solo: You get one take, no overdubs, and every mistake you make is going to be audible.

It’s like making a snap judgment that will be immortalized for the ages. Well, “immortalized” might be a bit hopeful, but it will be indefinitely Google-able. Any bad calls or shaky logic will be there to haunt me, should any critics wish to criticize my criticism.

But, again, I don’t think there’s shame in changing my mind. I’ve raved about books that didn’t stay with me the way I thought they would, and I’ve given qualified praise to books that seemed much better in retrospect. But if I change my mind in print, I’ll plan to acknowledge it, so it doesn’t look like I’ve been suddenly bribed or hitched a ride on the bandwagon. Changes of mind, heart, and taste can be an interesting part of the ongoing discussion of any book.

(Given that we trust our guts, reviewers are usually going to perceive changes in quality as the author’s accomplishment/fault, but we shouldn’t be afraid to blame ourselves, either.)

I’ve written in the past about getting it right. And, of course, there is no “right”; a book review is just one reviewer’s opinion–filtered by background, IQ, prejudice, and eccentricity. Hopefully the reviewer is well-read, intelligent, judicious, and has no cause to advance or ax to grind–or at least has the wisdom to take those into account. But still, if a review is just an opinion, it can’t be wrong if it expresses what the reviewer was thinking at the time.

When we can be wrong is when we try to make predictions. Making predictions isn’t part of the reviewer’s job–we’re neither oddsmakers nor business reporters. In his mea culpa regarding reviews of The Da Vinci Code and Failure to Launch, Tribune movie critic Michael Phillips notes:

Speculation regarding a film’s financial scorecard has nothing to do with criticism.

If a reviewer writes that a book is “destined to be the feel-good read of the summer,” not only is there an excellent chance that the reviewer will be wrong, casting doubt on whatever else he may write, it’s not actually helpful to readers. (Well, it might be helpful to readers who want to read what everyone else is reading, but most of them will wait to see what everyone is reading.) That kind of prediction only serves the ego of the reviewer, who wants to be right about something tangible and concrete and to get credit for having known that everyone would like it.

Who knows if everyone will like it? No one. If there was a formula for success, no one would have bothered to make Gigli. Reviews should focus on artistic success instead. Based on a book’s quality and its similarity to other works, we can reasonably assert that a book will have appeal to specific groups of people. And if it becomes the next Da Vinci Code, great. But no one knew The Da Vinci Code would be The Da Vinci Code. So it is possible to make modest predictions, such as “fans of literary thrillers will find much to like here.” That shows a knowledge of genre and also provides, in making the prediction, some useful information to the reader of the review.

It suddenly occurs to me that I closed my review of The Case of the Missing Books, by Ian Sansom, by saying:

Librarians have found themselves a new hero in Israel Armstrong, who, despite his unheroic demeanor, is a champion against bullshit and bureaucracy in the service of books.

On further consideration, I’ve changed my mind. If I were writing this review today I would instead say:

Librarians may have found themselves a new hero in Israel Armstrong, who, despite his unheroic demeanor, is a champion against bullshit and bureaucracy in the service of books.

Hey, I’ll be the first to admit it when I’m wrong.

As I’ve said before, I’m nothing if not untimely. But a good story is a good story, even if I’m an eternity-on-the-Internet 20 days late. Daniel Kraus, Associate Editor of American Libraries, forwarded this to me, saying that I’d probably read it already and that it was probably too old to mention (and that was a week ago). No on both counts, Dan.

From Who’s ready for William Faulkner’s ‘Nosferatu’? (Los Angeles Times):

But here’s the kicker: Faulkner, the Pulitzer and Nobel prize-winning writer of “As I Lay Dying,” “Light in August,” and “Absalom! Absalom!,” had harvested his astonishing talent to write … a vampire film.

Even more amazing, somebody’s planning to film it. But because it’s Faulkner, they plan to change the setting from “an anonymous Eastern European location” to the Deep South.

As long as they don’t name the vampire “Vlad Snopes.”

Ah, memories. Remember when James Frey (A Million Little Pieces, My Friend Leonard) was carried through the streets of New York on the shoulders of an adoring crowd, then crowned King of the Memoir by a teary Patricia Hampl (I Could Tell You Stories)–only to be later chased to the docks, dodging a bombardment of soggy vegetables, by a reading public outraged at being duped yet again?

Well, I don’t remember that, either, but I’m not going to let that stop me from including the above scenes in my memoir, I Remember Reading.

Anyway, apparently Buzz Bissinger (Three Nights in August) is attacking Augusten Burroughs for the paucity of fact (or the oversupply of truthiness) informing Running with Scissors (you know, that book that everybody, probably even you, suddenly seems to be reading on the bus).

The full story will appear in Vanity Fair next week, but Bissinger was kind enough to give the Boston Globe a sneak preview:

“I don’t know how [Burroughs] lives with himself,” Bissinger told us yesterday. ” ‘ Running With Scissors’ contains little strands of fact that were wildly embellished, and if you take those away, you don’t have much of a book.”

Bissinger thinks that Burroughs “betrayed” the Turcottes, the family Burroughs’ story is based on.

“They took him in and did their best, and he turned around and wrote about them in the most vile way possible,” he said. “It’s totally gratuitous.”

The Turcottes are, natch, suing Burroughs for defamation.

I was about to call this “a good, old-fashioned literary dust-up,” but the possibility that Burroughs is actually defaming well-intentioned people takes a little bit of the fun out of it. I guess I’ll just have to relish the Bissinger vs. Burroughs bout and hope that our legal system protects the innocent and punishes the guilty, whoever they might be.

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Dave Eggers versus David Foster Wallace, circa 1996, versus Dave Eggers versus David Foster Wallace, circa 2006.

Or, better, Dave Eggers, circa 1996, versus Dave Eggers, circa 2006.

Traver Kauffman at Rake’s Progress found Dave Eggers to be of two minds about Infinite Jest, albeit ten years apart.

Well, “rigorously unpretentious” (2006) isn’t exactly the same thing as being full of “superfluous and wildly tangential flights of lexical diarrhea” (1996), now is it?

This post has ignited mild brouhaha in the blogosphere. And Kauffman has upped the ante, offering to contribute money to 826 Valencia in exchange for ”a brief explanation of Dave’s change of opinion.”

I’ve definitely changed my mind about books–there’s nothing wrong with that. And I agree that people who put their minds on paper (or electrical impulses or whatever) are easier targets than those who change their minds over a beer in the corner bar. But all Kauffman wants is acknowledgment.

It’s OK to change your mind, I think we can all agree, but isn’t it important to own up to it? 

Seemingly Kauffman would have been satisfied if, in his newly revised assessment of Infinite Jest, Eggers had merely said, “You know, when I first read this book I didn’t like it very much–now I love it!” Fair enough. And I can’t imagine not considering a similar statement if I was about to change my mind in such a public fashion.

…

Halfway through the opinion I was about to offer I suddenly got tired of the subject. Is it me or are people just more thin-skinned these days? What’s wrong with asking a prominent author to explain himself? Is it actually possible for a blogger to “take down” a writer as prominent as Dave Eggers? What’s literature without a little sport?

I loved Dave Eggers’ most recent book, What Is the What, and by all accounts he’s a prince of a guy. But I don’t want to live in a world without some good literary arguments. So I’m siding with Kauffman: explain yourself, Eggers!

Last Thursday night I went to the release party (at the Museum of Contemporary Photography) for a beautiful, moving new book, Richard Nickel’s Chicago. Authors Richard Cahan and Michael Williams gave a brief but insight-laden talk about the work and legacy of Nickel, an architectural photographer whose crusade to save Chicago’s classic buildings from the wrecking ball ultimately led him to his death on a demolition site.

I’ve been fascinated by Nickel’s story ever since I first came across Cahan’s They All Fall Down: Richard Nickel’s Struggle to Save America’s Architecture. And I was thinking I’d write more about it here, but then on Sunday I saw that my colleague, Donna Seaman, had saved me the trouble with her extended review in the Chicago Tribune Books section.

Where They All Fall Down focuses on Nickel’s life, Richard Nickel’s Chicago focuses on his art, which has been understandably overlooked given the tragically romantic outlines of his life.

Anyway, see what Donna has to say.

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