Nilanjana S Roy: Psst! Wanna be an author?

SPEAKING VOLUMES

The really interesting thing about Kaavya Viswanathan's novel, How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life, has absolutely nothing to do with the book itself. The story of Opal Mehta, serious American teenage nerd with a one-point agenda""Get Into Harvard""is sweetly and funnily told.

Opal's Harvard interview goes off the rails when her interviewer asks her: "So, what do you do for fun?" She drops the ball, forcing the Mehta parents to switch track from HOWGIH (How Opal Will Get Into Harvard) to HOWGAL (How Opal Will Get A Life). Kaavya Viswanathan understands teenagers, which might be because she was one herself not so long ago""she is now in Harvard, preparing for a career on Wall Street.

It's a book I was perfectly happy to pick up, and just as happy to put down: until the warm-hearted, fun-filled film version is released, I won't have to think of Opal Mehta again, though it was nice knowing her while it lasted. But what puzzled me was How Kaavya Viswanathan Got Agent, Got Advance and Got the Big Hype Machine rolling.

In her interviews, Viswanathan comes across as a bright, interesting, self-assured young woman who lucked into the kind of book deal many older and more literary authors can still only dream about. But she and her interviewers actually have very little to say: the story is self-explanatory, there are few deeper meanings you can dig around for, and Viswanathan's own life is pleasantly ordinary. The interviews can only celebrate her success; we reviewers can only be pleased that Opal Mehta is kind of cute, kind of fun, the book kind of a good read.

The puzzling thing is that there are several authors writing for the same market who have produced work at least as good as Opal Mehta""Anjali Bannerji with Maya Running, for example""who haven't cracked the same deal. Kaavya Viswanathan is, at the very least, a competent writer: but she is also very much a product of today's market, a contemporary success story where the key elements are packaging and media managing, and where the book itself is just the content.

This is usually the point at which a reviewer is supposed to snort, paw the ground and tear into the bad, bad marketing machine that treats literature like burgers: all bestsellers have the same basic formula, tweaked a little bit for local palates. And I do understand Amit Chaudhuri's impatience with the Indian literary world for treating books as success stories, yet another mark of the India Shining brand conquering the world, the author as the son-in-law who's done so well.

But for the first time in publishing history, as several commentators have been pointing out recently, it has actually become possible for anyone to be a writer. There is no formula for great literary fiction, which is a bit of a problem; but then the market for literary fiction is a niche market, a boutique market, so the mainstream reader doesn't have to worry her head over that particular issue. It is often seen as a bad thing that more and more novels are being produced""I use that word deliberately""today; that creative writing courses allow anyone with a smidgeon of talent access to a wider market, once they've polished their skills; that any reasonably bright person can hammer out a book in six months and have a decent shot at being published.

The obvious argument against applying the laws of the marketplace to literature is that sales are far more important in publishing terms than quality. If you look at what's been resold to India as the great Indian novel in recent years, if you look at the world's bestseller lists, it's hard to disagree that publishing is no longer about looking at the literary qualities of a book.

But there's another way of looking at this: for the first time in the history of writing and publishing, it is possible for everyone to be, or contemplate being, an author. In the initial stages of this exercise in democracy, books will almost by definition be written for the moment; a lot of what "succeeds" will be only average; a lot of books will be written by many for a very few readers. Give it time, though, and if novel-writing becomes as much a pastime or occupation as music lessons once were, we could end up with strange and compelling new stories. I'm willing to applaud the Kaavya Viswanathans of this world while we wait to see exactly what the new democracy will bring""a wave of well-written trash, or something rather more lasting, more durable.

nilanjanasroy@gmail.com