Neal Bowers, a well-published poet and tenured university professor, is living the good life in Ames, Iowa. Or at least he is, until he learns that several of his poems have been plagiarized, meaning stolen and published nearly word for word under a name other than his own. This startling news rocks his life, setting him off on a search for the perpetrator that fundamentally alters his orientation to his life's work.
For the most part, this is a book of enormous disappointment and disillusionment. How could someone steal his work so brazenly? He is also disappointed in his friends and colleagues. Why do they not understand the enormity of this violation? Why are they not more sympathetic to his plight? Many of them cannot understand why he continues to be so concerned with the case, particularly once the plagiarist has been identified. Bowers cannot understand why they are not.
In addition, Bowers is disappointed with the law. Why is it so ineffectual? After discussing his case with several uninterested attorneys, he hires a local lawyer and a private detective who never quite manage to live up to Bowers's expectations despite succeeding in tracking down and extracting a letter of apology from the plagiarist, David Jones, complete with a token check for $100 in compensation for trouble caused. Jones appears “judgment-proof,” having earned a grand total of $650 in the previous calendar year. For this, Bowers accrues more than $4,000 in attorney's fees (some of which he contests as unfair charges).
Rather than experiencing the expected exhilaration at having finally caught up with the perpetrator, what he finds is a troublingly manipulative and rather pathetic compulsive liar who cannot seem to hold down a job teaching elementary school. When he is unsatisfied with this result, his attorney asks him what he wants from the law and Bowers somewhat sheepishly notes that what he desires is justice, or “mak[ing] him give back what he took from me” (p. 75).
The damage already having been done, Bowers realizes that this is impossible.
The confessional nature of Bowers's poems seems to exacerbate his feelings of violation, as the stolen poems focus on unresolved feelings surrounding the death of Bowers's father. In a 1998 interview, Bowers commented that the poems “have the stench of David Jones about them. … In an unexpected and bizarre way, Jones has invaded not just my poetry but also my private past. Almost every thought of my father evokes thoughts of Jones. That's the thing for which I can never forgive Jones” (The Cortland Review 1998: n.p.).
This perhaps explains why he continues to pursue more information about Jones. How many poems has he plagiarized? How many other poets have been victimized? Could he compel a more direct statement of guilt from him? The pursuit of Jones continues until, near the end of the book, Bowers discloses the startling fact that Jones is a convicted child molester.
This book reveals an interesting paradox about plagiarism: continuing to discuss it publicly seems to be both the best defense against it at the same time that it appears to keep Bowers's wound open (not to mention the enormous amount of attention it seems to provide to the plagiarist.) As a result of this book, originally published by W. W. Norton in 1997, Bowers becomes a national expert on plagiarism, called on for comments from a variety of news sources including The New York Times. (One imagines that its reprinting by Southern Illinois University Press will keep the issue alive longer still.) At one point, noted playwright Tony Kushner calls Bowers while reading his book during an intercontinental flight, enthusiastically talking about optioning it for a Hollywood movie. Though he never hears back from Kushner, Bowers does sell the film rights to a production company (and, perhaps predictably, is disappointed in the resulting script). Thus in an ironic twist the book ends with Bowers appearing to profit from the work of Jones.
Though this book raises many important issues about plagiarism, the specifics of the case related to both the victim and the perpetrator detract from rather than enhance that discussion. I had a good amount of sympathy for the author, who was an accomplished poet and professor at the time of plagiarism but who actually stopped writing poems thereafter and turned instead to writing this book and novels. Thus the plagiarism changed the course of his life's work. However, I never really felt that I understood what the author was trying to accomplish in this book beyond eliciting that sympathy. Although that may well be a worthy story, it is a familiar one, and not the more creative narrative that I hoped to encounter in this book.
This is perhaps my disappointment, then, and it stems from the fact that I was quite intrigued by the author's promise of using mystery (complete with crimes, detectives, and sensational and noir-ish revelations) as a means of getting a different purchase on a serious issue such as plagiarism. I was hoping that using a different form would allow the author to tell a different story or to alter the content of what might be said about plagiarism. I was disappointed not to find more evidence of that in this book.
