The Reluctant Fisherman

The Lost Painting: The Quest for a Caravaggio
Masterpiece
Jonathan Harr
Random House (2005), 288 pgs.

I first encountered Jonathan Harr a few years ago when a friend encouraged me to read A Civil Action. At the time I worked as an attorney and I found Harr’s realistic (and often cynical) portrayal of the hazards of civil litigation highly entertaining. More to the point, I enjoyed his strong characterizations and his storytelling ability—Harr excels at the art of making non-fiction books read like novels.

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Or anything remotely close to it?

Unless you’re having oxygen pumped into your time capsule, you’ve probably heard all you can stand about Kaavya Viswanathan, the Harvard University sophomore who attracted a whole lot of attention to herself and her chick-lit novel, How Opal Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life, when she admitted to copying parts of the book from two other young adult novels by Megan McCafferty. You’ve probably also heard that while Ms. Viswanathan has admitted to the plagiarism, she insists it was an “unintentional and unconscious” mistake and may have been the result of her “photographic memory.”

Unintentional and unconscious? Photographic memory? This story could be mined for snazzy one-liners until Christmas if it wasn’t so morally depressing. And it gets worse, or better, depending on which side of profit margin you’re on.

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