Pros: Good defense of capitalism, intriguing in parts
Cons: Turgid, bloated, humorless, unabating...
The Bottom Line: Rand's book is a favorite of sophisticated high schooler's everyone. She could have made her point in one quarter of the space and not embarrassed herself in the bargain.
buffoonery's Full Review: Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged: A Philosophical and Lit...
The title of this essay, of course, is derived from a remark in Whitaker Chambers's famous National Review essay on Atlas Shrugged back in 1957 or so, in which he savaged Ayn Rand's economic and philosophical tract that was cleverly disguised as a novel. Rand never forgave Bill Buckley for publishing the review and once said if he ever entered a room she was in she would immediately leave. Rand thereafter remained an enemy of the traditional right, especially the Roman Catholic-tinged version espoused by the NR.
So get this straight: Conservatives don't view Rand as a conservative, Rand didn't view herself as a conservative, and Atlas Shrugged is not a conservative manifesto.
Now, I think Chambers was a little hard on the book-he was not happy with a world ruled by technocrats-- but in all honesty, this can be pretty bad in parts. I first read this novel when I was eighteen and I was entranced by it. I've grown up since then, and whatever entertainment value the book had is too often subsumed by the absurdity of the plot, its constant repetition of ideas, and the total, unremitting, wearying lack of humor.
Atlas Shrugged is set in a vaguely futuristic 1960's America-futuristic, that is, from the mid-50's perspective Rand had when she wrote the book. It is her take on what might happen to freedom, economic prosperity, and indeed the human condition under a socialism writ victorious in America. Its vision is pretty bleak, but the good guys win out in the end, or at least they do if you buy Rand's ideas. There is even a bit of a science fiction element as her technocrat heroes, by the mere exercise of their will (combined with their superb taste in tailored clothing and expensive furnishings--there's a lot of that stuff in this book), develop superior metal, electronics and such like, all of which they employ on their path to final victory.
The book is populated by two character types: heroic materialist capitalists on the one hand and miserable "looter" socialists on the other. There is absolutely no in between, with the possible exception of poor Eddie Willers.
One way you can tell the good from the bad is that the good guys name their companies after themselves-Taggart Transcontinental, Rearden Steel, Wyatt Oil-while the bad guys have companies with faceless names like Associated Steel or have wormy personal names like Balph, Chick, Mouch and Scudder. The other way is that Rand tells you who they are-relentlessly, endlessly, and indubitably. The pure black and white characterization solves two problems for Rand: one, it allows her to evince her political views most unsparingly--yeah, she really DOES mean it--, second, it spares her the trouble of creating characters with real-life personalities who might utter words that real life people might say in real life. The latter might have actually required her to write.
In case you haven't gotten my point, the dialogue in this novel is dreadful. That's OK, because so is the prose. Look, to have a good novel you need believable characters speaking believable words. It's not enough to go on a tear for eleven hundred pages. Readers demand plot, dialogue, and characterization. If you don't want to have a good novel, you can write like Rand does and preach to the choir. This book is so dense and bloated that it makes The Fountainhead read like Hemingway.
To be truthful, there is a bit of a plot. While the looters are destroying the country, some resolute capitalists are trying to preserve it. But in the midst of this vigorous defense lurks an unknown destroyer who is stealing away some of these stalwarts. "Who is John Galt?" goes the cry, until that personage is revealed in the third reel, as it were.
But Rand could have accomplished her goals in maybe half the space. And, as somebody who has spent a professional lifetime in law and finance I have to howl with laughter every time I read the part where the victors amend the Constitution to preclude any regulation of business. Only a person entirely unacquainted with the practical problems of human behavior-like fraudulent conduct-- could have written those lines.
Let us look at a few of the characters. The protagonist is Dagny Taggart, who Rand described as herself on a good day (unlike Dominique Francon of The Fountainhead). Taggart is beautiful, smart, and motivated, running her railroad with the confidence and aplomb that her sluggard brother lacks. On the way, Taggart copulates frequently and gymnastically with whatever superman capitalist happens to be available, beginning with the improbably named Francisco Domingo Andres Fizzbin Potzrebie D'Anconia to the unhappily married industrialist Hank Rearden. (An accomplished adulteress herself, such conduct never concerned Rand.) D'Anconia, however, is an apparent traitor to his class, a superbly talented businessman and philosopher turned playboy. Rearden is Atlas, carrying the weight of the world and his leaching family on his shoulders. Other emerge, only to disappear with distressing regularity as the country sinks into the abyss.
The bad guys are scarcely worth mentioning, being a collection of loathsome creatures, grubs who live beneath rocks, emerging only at night to write libelous broadsides in bad magazines or to pass another law restricting competition, slinking back into the muck as the dim dawn rises in the east.
While we're at it, let us discuss the ideas for a bit. Rand is a strident proponent of unfettered capitalism and that's fine as far as it goes. I am too, for the most part, but I'm willing to accept a certain amount of regulation that Rand can't tolerate. On her philosophy of Objectivism I have little to say except that as a practicing Roman Catholic I find her atheism absurd, some of her notions of personal conduct repugnant, and her support of abortion abhorrent. But more than that, her atheism and rejection of Original Sin implies that man is perfectible by his own means, a mistaken notion I thought we had learned by the sorry examples of the Soviet Union and Red China.
In other words, my by-and-large agreement with Rand on economics (yeah, I've got a copy of Reisman's Capitalism at home, too) doesn't make up for our enormous philosophical gap.
Now, I don't think that Atlas Shrugged is a wretched piece of junk like Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States (see my review of this truly atrocious book at http://www.epinions.com/book-review-634D-21461EB9-39EDE818-prod4 ) or the Communist Manifesto. Indeed, I think Atlas Shrugged is a very important book and it and The Fountainhead are very fine introductions to capitalism, once you get past--well, you get the picture. It is a good place for people to start and I think every educated American should read it. Younger people will find it more attractive than older, one because the ideas are presented so starkly and second because on the whole they have less of an appreciation for the difference between good and bad writing. But you have to move on to more mature reading-Hayek and Friedman for economics, Burke, Acton and Kirk for politics, Sowell on sociology. And as philosophy, I find Atlas Shrugged potentially dangerous and personally offensive in parts; I think I'll stick to Aquinas and Newman.
Five stars, just because the book is so unintentionally funny.
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