On Blogging The Fountainhead; And: Conclusions

A few years ago, David Plotz, a not-very-religious writer at slate.com, took on the task of blogging the Bible. It was a popular series of articles. Plotz learned a lot, his readers learned a lot, and he eventually got a book out of the experience. It helped that he's a good writer.

January 2011. Here I am, trying to push myself to write. And here's this book, The Fountainhead, which some denounce as trash and some revere as a religious text. So hey! If Plotz can blog a long book, so can I. If nothing else, it will be good writing practice.

And so it was. I can't vouch for the reader's experience. I'm not sure I even want to think about it. But overall, it's been a gas to write. There will not be a book, however.

The debate over Ayn Rand continues. Andrew Sullivan's blog, The Dish, has hosted an ongoing discussion of Rand's influence. A couple of interesting assertions:

Objectivism is the sort of philosophy many kids adopt and then grow out of by the time they're thirteen. I get the point. We are instructed to sneer at any grownup who looks up to Rand and her ideas. Right. Why limit ourselves to a discussion of the ideas—and from what I've seen of it, I do find Objectivism to be pretty laughable—when we can throw personal insults about. That's so adult.

Rand's novels are particularly appealing to high-achieving girls; they completely identify with the geniuses under attack by a conformist society. Interesting thought. The idea is that in school, girls are put under intense peer pressure not to stand out. Just when they want to discover their selves and cultivate their own abilities, they are told to stay with the pack. Hmm. I don't know if that's true, but it makes sense.

My far-too-brief, altogether-too-pat conclusions—

Ayn Rand was a skilled writer and a droning, ham-handed polemicist. She did a brilliant job skewering the hypocricy of the left. She could write exciting bits of plot. But it was her ambition to preach, to prove her system. Her ideal, the self-contained genius, doesn't work in the real world.

In condemning altruism, she claims that no one can reach the ideal of being a pure altruist; thus we are all condemned to fall short. Yet being a pure individualist is just as impossible for everyone but the sociopath. We are all doomed to be something less than pure egotists.

But I'm venturing into philosophy and getting rapidly out of my depth. Let's get back to the book.

Roark and Toohey bear the burden of personifying the extremes of Rand's world-view; they barely register as human. Roark is innocent genius, mostly disconnected from human interaction. (His out-of-character friendship with Wynand is the one part of the novel's depiction that works.) Toohey is a caricature, a mustache-twirling villain.

Dominique is wildly inconsistent, and not in the way actual human beings can be inconsistent. She simply becomes a different person to suit the story, from devouring femme fatale to icily cordial wife to swooning lover to footnote.

Keating is all flaws and no nobility. He is the bedraggled cat captured by the author and released with a string of cans tied to its tail.

Wynand is the character most fully fleshed-out. He is a man of great genius and drive, but circumstances put him on the path of accumulating power, which eventually gains him nothing. His collapse is a bit abrupt, but he breathes real air from time to time.

Rand's universe is a twisted place. The heroes are all rough beasts, unsociable and instinctively disliked by others. Kindliness is the sign of a villain. The people of the world are full of latent hostility, like iron filings rising up in the presence of a magnet. Originality and genius are frightful things to be beaten down as soon as they appear. To Rand, the primary emotion of man is jealousy. The book seems to have been written from a defensive crouch.

I will be paying one more visit to the world of The Fountainhead, and then I will put it behind me. Stay tuned.