Literary paper lions: book packagers, drunken exaggerations, hoaxes: why do we still expect authenticity from bestsellers?

• Author: Cavanaugh, Tim

KAAVYA VISWANATHAN was riding high in April, shot down in May. The Harvard sophomore's debut novel--How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life, for which she had received a $500,000 advance at the age of 17--was moving up the bestseller lists. The chick-lit book detailed the struggles of an Indian-American high-school girl trying to maintain a social life and get into the Ivy League. Opal Mehta's apparently autobiographical story--celebrated in The New York Times, USA Today, and many other venues--was making Viswanathan a media sensation, a model of the kind of deranged precocity that Harvard increasingly demands of its students. Then in late April The Harvard Crimson revealed that Viswanathan had plagiarized more than a dozen passages from two young adult books by Megan McCafferty.

Within a day, the story was national news. Within two days, Viswanathan was brought onto the Today show for a deft public dressing down by Katie Couric. A creepy new wrinkle appeared: Viswanathan had probably not written the book in any traditional sense. Instead she had "conceptualized" it in partnership with the "book packager" Alloy Entertainment. Before the week was out, publisher Little, Brown had pulped Opal Mehta, and Viswanathan's literary career was effectively over. (It has since emerged that Opal Mehta may have also borrowed phrases and devices from several other successful authors.)

Viswanathan's plagiarism, though it is the most serious charge against her, is only part of what made her radioactive. It was the careful packaging of both book and author by an army of experts, and the public exposure of the mechanics of that process, that put her into a recent rogues gallery that so far includes a defense industry CEO who stole from an old book, a putative memoirist who was just making stuff up, and, most amusing of all, an author who doesn't even exist.

To recap: Raytheon CEO William H. Swanson was revealed to have cribbed about half the aphorisms in his 2005 booklet Swanson's Unwritten Rules of Management from a 1944 book by the late W.J. King.James Frey, whose best-selling drug addiction memoir A Million Little Pieces had been an Oprah's Book Club selection, turned out to have invented substantial portions of the book (at the behest, says Frey, of publisher Nan Talese, who saw more market potential in a memoir than in the novel Frey had originally conceived; Talese denies this).

And young JT LeRoy, an author of autobiographical stories of...