Academic standards
This novel depicts academia as having double standards and false standards. When the boy is caught plagiarizing, he knows he has broken an ethical code, but what he doesn't know then he learns later in the book: All the people who judged him so harshly were liars too, and the idea of "not lying" in a fictional story is explored satirically. The theme portrays academic justice as a mystery.
The androgynous loner
Although this is a subtle theme, it is very important. The young Jewish boy doesn't just steal any story to make his own. He steals a story from a Jewish girl who also is the only Jew at her prep school, so their emotions are very similar, but although the boys in his school are fiercely aligned with gender roles, the boy is not. When he changes the story to be about a boy instead of a girl, he changes nothing else, and the result is prize-winning literature, literally.
Honesty and art
The story is often pretty tongue-in-cheek, using irony as a scalpel with which he criticizes art and the standards about artistic integrity. He notices that patriarchy and power dynamics are often in place long before the standards get applied, and although he lies and cheats to get ahead, which is morally dubious, the judges who condemn him are shown to be guilty in identical ways.
