By the Book

by Julia Sonneborn

  Lauren came and sat next to me on the couch. She was still dressed in her black suit, but she’d taken off her jacket and heels and her face looked drawn.

  “Do you like him?” she asked.

  I looked at her quizzically. “What kind of question is that?” I asked.

  “I just want to know if you like him. Are you serious about him?”

  “Yes, I like him,” I said cagily. “And we’re seeing how things go.”

  “OK,” Lauren said. I waited for her to interrogate me further, ask me what kind of professor Rick was, what he looked like, how old he was, how much money he made, but she didn’t. She sank back into the couch and put the back of her hand against her forehead.

  “I’m glad you’re seeing someone,” she said, closing her eyes. “Maybe I can meet him sometime.”

  I looked at her in surprise, but her eyes were still closed. The torrent of sisterly advice I expected never came.

  Early the next day, we went to the storage locker where we’d stashed most of my father’s belongings before he moved into the assisted-living facility. I’d hired one of my students to help cart away the heavier things to Goodwill—my dad’s old metal filing cabinet, an ancient ham radio transmitter, a wooden grandfather clock that only chimed at the half hour. Sifting through the detritus of our father’s life, I wondered if it was frugality or fear that compelled him to save so much stuff. Some of the stuff made sense (picture albums, passports), but others made me scratch my head (a broken plant stand, a puzzle missing half its pieces). Lauren and I worked steadily through the morning, stuffing his clothes and shoes into garbage bags, tossing everything else into the dumpster.

  We took a break around lunchtime, sitting wearily among the remaining boxes. My arms were covered with dry pink welts and my fingers ached, and I drank greedily from the bottle of water Lauren handed over to me.

  “Check this out,” Lauren said, digging through a box that once held bottles of Gatorade. “I can’t believe Dad saved all this stuff,” she said, pulling out a stack of old report cards and notebooks tied together with a disintegrating rubber band. She loosened a Mead notebook from the pile. “What’s this?” she asked, studying the faded purple cover dotted with stickers and doodles.

  I tried to grab it from her. “That’s mine!” I said.

  “Whoa, wait a second,” she said, pulling the notebook out of reach. She opened the notebook and began reading aloud.

  “ ‘The Curse of Castle Montague, by Anastasia Corey.’ Anastasia Corey? Are you serious?”

  “I was twelve!”

  “ ‘Lavinia Montague had flaming Titian-hued tresses and sparkling emerald-green eyes. She was the youngest daughter of the evil Count Manfred, tyrannical lord of the mysterious land of Vavasour.’ ” Lauren burst out laughing. “There must be ten notebooks filled with this stuff!” she said. “When did you find the time to write all this?”

  “While you were on the phone talking to your friends and Dad was in his room avoiding us. I had this whole fantasy world mapped out where I was the spunky heroine with a mean father and an evil stepsister.”

  “No way. Was I the evil stepsister? What was my name?”

  “Bertha Gorgonzola.”

  “I love it! I had no idea you had such a crazy imagination.”

  I sighed. “Dad was always telling me to stop making up stories and go do something. It’s too bad he didn’t live long enough to see my book come out. Maybe that would’ve changed his mind.”

  “I doubt it,” Lauren said, grinning at me. She held up the rest of the notebooks. “So do you want to keep these or toss them?”

  “Keep them!” I yelled. “Give those to me!”

  I ended up keeping my notebooks, report cards, and a tarnished letter-opener that my father had used to tear open bills. Lauren kept an album of photographs, some old coins, and my father’s wedding ring, which we found stuffed into a Ziploc bag with some ancient aspirin pills. The rest we threw out or donated.

  “I feel like an orphan,” Lauren said.

  “We are orphans,” I said.

  We’d asked that people make donations to the American Heart Association in lieu of flowers, and in the days following the funeral, Lauren and I sat at my kitchen table and wrote thank-you notes to everyone who had contributed. I was touched by some of the names on the list—a former student, an old neighbor, an acquaintance at the gym. The English department pitched in a sizable donation, as did many of Lauren’s friends.

  “Wow, Bex donated five thousand bucks,” Lauren said, glancing down the list. “I can’t believe she made it down to Fairfax for the service. That’s so typical of her—she’s so incredibly generous and sweet. And she’s going through such a tough time herself.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked. I’d written so many thank-you cards, straining to be personal and original in each one, that my hand and my brain were cramping in unison.

  “Oh, you know, all those stupid rumors about Jack. She can barely leave her house without being hounded.”

  “Oh, yeah,” I said. I’d totally forgotten about the scandal.

  “I’m glad she’s got that library project to distract her—from what everyone’s told me, Adam’s been a pillar of support.” Lauren sighed. “She deserves to be with someone who realizes how amazing she is.”

  Lauren opened up a card and began to compose a note to Bex, writing smoothly and briskly. Unlike me, she didn’t seem to have trouble finding the right words.

  “Oh, look,” I said in surprise, tracing my finger farther down the list. “I think Adam donated, too.” His name appeared toward the bottom of the donor list.

  “Must be a gift on behalf of the college,” Lauren said without looking up. “Brett’s firm also made a donation.”

  I looked more closely, but Adam’s title and institutional affiliation weren’t listed. “Adam Martinez,” it read. “Gift in Memory of Jerome F. Corey.”

  “Can you write him a thank-you card?” Lauren asked. “I’ll sign it when you’re done.”

  I nodded. Opening up a fresh card, I hesitated, not knowing quite what to say.

  Dear President Martinez,

  Thank you very much for your donation to the American Heart Association in memory of our father, Jerome Corey. We have been overwhelmed by the generosity and support of friends like you. Your gift will go toward heart disease and stroke research and education, patient care and outreach, and other life-saving efforts.

  I paused. It was boilerplate. I wondered if I dared write something more personal, glancing at Lauren. She hadn’t seen my breakdown at the funeral service. She hadn’t seen Adam comforting me, or getting me another packet of tissues, or helping me stop my runaway hiccups so that I could return to the chapel and continue to accept condolences. Adam had walked me inside but quickly excused himself when the funeral director approached me with some questions. The last I saw him, he was standing next to Bex and one of her friends, listening to Lauren and nodding his head.

  “Thank you for being there for me during this difficult time,” I desperately wanted to write. “Thank you for listening to me, and for understanding my complicated relationship with my father, and for letting me cry on your shoulder. I will never forget your steadfast generosity and kindness.” I felt the tears spring to my eyes again, feeling a roiling mix of grief, regret, and longing. Turning away from Lauren, I surreptitiously brushed my face with the sleeve of my sweater.

  I’ll write him a separate note later, I decided. The last thing I wanted to do was invite more questions from Lauren.

  “Thank you so much for attending the service,” I wrote hastily, signing the card “Anne Corey” and passing it to Lauren, who barely looked up from what she was doing. She glanced at the card, announced that it “looked good,” and signed. I slipped the card into an envelope and addressed it c/o The Office of the President, Fairfax College, Fairfax, CA, adding it to the stack of cards Lauren planned to deposit at the local post office.

  Lauren left a
short while later, promising to call me soon. “You should spend the summer in LA,” she said as she hugged me good-bye. “You and Rick—is that his name? You and Rick could stay in our guesthouse. It would be good for you to get out of Fairfax.”

  I looked at Lauren in surprise. “Only if you want to,” she added, seeing my hesitation.

  “No—I really appreciate it,” I said. “I’ll definitely con-sider it.”

  “Now that dad’s gone, we should really make more of an effort to, you know, hang out.”

  “I’d like that.”

  After Lauren left, I slowly climbed the stairs back to my apartment. With my sister gone, the apartment felt lifeless. I tried to tidy up, washing out some glasses and throwing a load of laundry into the washer. The bouquet of flowers Rick had sent me on the day of the funeral had wilted and gone brown. I salvaged the least bedraggled flowers and placed them in a smaller vase. The rest of the arrangement I tossed in the trash, where they scattered bright yellow pollen all over the container and floor. I was cleaning up the mess when my phone started to vibrate. It was Larry.

  “What’s going on?” I asked. “My sister literally just left.”

  “Have you seen the news today?” he asked urgently.

  “Not yet,” I said. “Oh no—is it about Jack? Did they leak more secret footage? Lauren was telling me things are still bad—”

  “No, no—it’s not about that,” Larry said. “It’s about Rick.”

  “Rick??”

  “Check the front page of the New York Times,” he said. “And sit tight. I’m coming over right now.”

  I opened up my computer and went to the Times website. What I saw made my jaw drop open in shock.

  chapter eighteen

  Famed Author Accused of Plagiarism

  By Andrew Terasawa

  The rumors began soon after the critically acclaimed author Richard Forbes Chasen received the Booker Prize for his sprawling and ambitious postmodern novel, Subterranean City. The book, people whispered, had been plagiarized.

  Chasen, 35, known as much for his rugged good looks as his sinewy prose, has been the subject of envy for years. Ever since he burst onto the literary scene at the age of twenty-one, he has collected several major literary prizes and was recently named to the New Yorker’s vaunted “Forty Under Forty” list. The Booker was just the latest in a long string of professional accolades.

  That is, until a commentator on an online discussion board posted an innocent question about Chasen’s work.

  “Has anyone noticed that Chasen totally rips off Dickens in Chapter 4 of Subterranean City?” a user named Bibliophyllis917 wrote. “Like not just parodies Dickens but actually copies his sentences word for word from Bleak House?”

  “He’s openly acknowledged his debt to Dickens,” another member wrote back. “It’s no big deal.”

  But the question posed by Bibliophyllis917 seemed to trigger a raft of similar observations. Discussion members pointed out sections of the novel in which pronouns or place names had been changed but in which the bulk of the language was otherwise identical to passages by contemporary writers, such as Salman Rushdie, Kurt Vonnegut, and Terry Eagleton. And Chasen didn’t just borrow from the literary and scholarly elite. A member with the handle KirkDaedelus alleged that Chasen had plagiarized from Rotten Tomatoes movie reviews, contemporary romance novels, and even a corporate training handbook.

  Chasen had already been accused of “self- plagiarism” by Rian Murphy, a journalist and critic who has repeatedly called him out for recycling previous work on his Paris Review blog. Murphy has also expressed concern about Chasen’s journalistic practices. “I’ve found numerous instances in Chasen’s reportage where I couldn’t locate or confirm his sources,” Murphy says. “I started to suspect he might be fabricating quotations out of whole cloth. But when I confronted him about this, he always had some ready excuse. He claimed he had access to interviews that weren’t publicly available, or that he was bound by journalistic ethics from revealing his sources. It was always something or other.”

  “It’s sick,” says one of Chasen’s most vocal critics, the novelist Alice Duffy. “His utter inability to be forthright and truthful suggests something on the order of a mental illness.”

  Another writer, the legal scholar Lindell McKenzie, expressed shock when presented with evidence that Chasen had lifted several long passages from her 2007 nonfiction book, On Justice and Inequality. “When I saw how he’d taken my words without attribution, I felt—well, quite honestly, I felt like I’d been violated.”

  Chasen’s supporters have bridled at these statements, calling them inflammatory and hysterical. The Guardian book critic Angus Malcolm, a longtime friend and advocate for Chasen’s work, says writers like Duffy and McKenzie are simply “jealous.” “There’s a long literary tradition of great artists borrowing from sources high and low,” he said. “Look it up. It’s called bricolage.” Virginia Miller, a literary scholar at Cornell University, concurs: “Poets like Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot often appropriated the works of other writers, and they were considered literary geniuses, not thieves.”

  Yet these latest accusations are giving pause to even longtime fans of Chasen’s work. The New York Times has independently verified at least 67 instances of exact or near-exact plagiarism (see Table 1). Some instances are only a sentence or two long. Others go on for pages. Faced with such overwhelming evidence, Francesca Youngblood, a professor at Columbia who is writing a book on Chasen, said, “It’s pretty damning. I mean, maybe it’s a weird postmodern experiment or some kind of joke on the reader. I just hope he has some kind of explanation.”

  Efforts to reach Chasen for comment were unsuccessful, but his New York–based literary agent, Timothy Brown, issued a statement in which he accused unnamed sources of mounting an “orchestrated vendetta” against Chasen. “Mr. Chasen is prepared to defend himself vigorously against these attacks,” Brown wrote. “We are in the process of seeking legal counsel and will pursue all possible options. In the meantime, we ask the public to withhold judgment.”

  Whether Chasen’s Booker Prize will be rescinded is unclear. When contacted, the Booker Prize committee confirmed that they were investigating the matter but declined additional comment. Chasen is currently listed as a “Writer-in-Residence” at Fairfax College in California. A spokesperson for the school confirmed his employment there but would not provide further information, citing confidentiality laws.

  Currently, Chasen’s publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, has no plans to pull Subterranean City from the shelves. The novel has been a substantial hit for the press, selling nearly a million copies since it was awarded the Booker Prize in 2015. It was issued in paperback this past January.

  Meanwhile, some are wondering why it took people so long to raise concerns about Chasen’s plagiarism.

  The novelist Duffy has a couple theories. “First of all, I think a lot of people started the novel but didn’t get very far,” she said. “And then there’s the incredible level of trust readers place in authors. Even if they notice fishy passages, they’re inclined to give the author the benefit of the doubt.”

  Legal scholar McKenzie has another hypothesis. “I think that lots of people think plagiarism isn’t that big of a deal,” she says. “I mean, look at all these students who copy and paste from Wikipedia. They think it’s a victimless crime.”

  She shakes her head. “I’m a writer,” she says. “All I have are my words. If Richard Chasen steals them from me, he’s taken the most important thing I have.”

  I felt like I’d had the wind knocked out of me. Rick— a plagiarist? My mind couldn’t fathom it. There was nothing I held more sacred than words. It was what I studied, what I labored over, what I revered. To claim another person’s words as one’s own was unthinkable. It was the cardinal sin of writing.

  I could still remember the first time I’d encountered plagiarism and how deeply it had offended me. I was in the third grade, and the teacher held up a
book report and announced that whoever had written it had forgotten to put his or her name on the report. Chris Manning had leapt up to claim it, and the teacher asked him to read it aloud to the class. As I listened to him stumble through descriptions of the various species of penguins, I felt a sudden, sickening jolt of recognition.

  “That’s my report,” I blurted out, jumping from my seat.

  The class was speechless.

  “Is it true?” the teacher asked.

  Chris looked at me blankly, shrugged, and handed me the report. I clutched it to my chest, incredulous that someone would dare take credit for my words.

  “Next time, remember to put your name on your work, Anne,” the teacher said.

  More than twenty years later, I could still feel the anger I’d felt toward Chris. How could he? How could he claim my words as his own? And how could he be so cavalier about it when he was caught?

  But Chris, I reminded myself, was a lazy and not-very-bright eight-year-old. Rick, on the other hand, was a highly acclaimed literary genius. There was no way he could pull something so egregious, and in such a clumsy, brazen way. I was sure of it. It just didn’t make sense.

  By the time Larry appeared at my apartment a few minutes later, I’d almost convinced myself of Rick’s innocence.

  “It can’t be true,” I told him. “Rick wouldn’t plagiarize.”

  “Did you read the article?” Larry asked. He’d arrived armed with a bottle of tequila and a box of tissues and couldn’t seem to understand why I didn’t need either. “You must be in shock. They put passages from Rick’s novel next to their sources. It’s pretty blatant.”

  “But there must be some reason he did this. Why would he risk it?”

  “Maybe he can’t help himself? Maybe he has a compulsive disorder?”

  “Where he can’t help but steal other people’s words? What is that even? Graphokleptomania?”

  “I don’t know. You tell me. Did he ever let you read anything he was working on?”