On his blog, author and New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell offers his take on the Kaavya Viswanathan plagiarism controversy (see In Other Media passim). And his take is pretty much, What’s the big deal?

Writes Gladwell: “This is teen-literature. It’s genre fiction. These are novels based on novels based on novels, in which every convention of character and plot has been trotted out a thousand times before. If I wrote a detective story, set in 1930’s Los Angeles, about a cynical, hard-bitten private eye, with a drop dead gorgeous secretary and a series of lonely housewife clients, would anyone bat an eye? Of course not. It may be a stolen premise. But we accept that within the category of genre fiction a certain amount of borrowing of themes and plots and ideas is acceptable—even laudable.”

The no-big-deal argument drew no less than 78 comments as of this writing, most of them opposed to Gladwell’s post and many of them thoughtful and well argued. So much so that Gladwell backtracked, a little bit at least, in a second post. “I didn’t mean to be condescending towards teen-lit or any other kind of genre fiction,” he writes. “I’m a spy novel nut. I have read every thriller in the airport bookstore. My point was simply that genre fiction is by definition derivative.”

Related links:
Click here for Gladwell’s post about Kaavya Viswanathan