Word: mehtas
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...Sure, the book, cumbersomely titled “How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life,” provides Future Great American Novelists’ jealous bitterness some vindication. “Opal Mehta” is, as my friend Leon Neyfakh ’07 wrote in Fifteen Minutes last month, “a fairy tale, more or less,” and a lot of its details are as unconvincing and unfelt as pre-Pixar Disney...
...Much ink has been wasted wondering whether “Opal Mehta” is autobiographical. Opal Mehta is surely not Kaavya Viswanathan in disguise; she is, more likely, Kaavya Viswanathan in Kaavya Viswanathan’s dreams. Letting us in on the fantasy is Viswanathan’s gift to us. We get to follow Opal as she transforms overnight from member of the “Geek Squad” to literally the center of every male’s attention...
...takes something more than wish-fulfillment and a funny premise, however, to win so much attention. Like “Mean Girls,” “Opal Mehta” is chick lit mixed with satire. Rather than Queen Bees/Wannabes, however, Opal Mehta represents what might be called the Pre-Organization Kid, the protozoan phase of the sociological type first dutifully reduced to caricature by David Brooks in 2001. “The Organization Kid,” he wrote, is fatally “goal-oriented...
...Opal Mehta, just a high school senior, lives her life on this stairway. Pushed by immigrant parents for whom Harvard admission is a matter of family pride, Opal has spent her life following a series of multi-step plans, each with its own abbreviation (“How Opal Will Get Into Harvard,” HOWGIH, is replaced by “How Opal Will Get a Life,” HOWGAL) and all of them with one destination: Harvard...
Like David Brooks’ Organization Kid, Opal Mehta is a professional student. Over the course of the book, she also becomes a professional partier; “fun” is just one more category to check off her resume. To learn to dance, Opal watches a music video by Beyonce with a pen and paper in hand: “Swivel hips left, then forward,” she writes for the purposes of later memorization. To learn to have fun, she studies teen movies...