Atlas Shrugged

Rand succeeds despite shitty politics and a sophomoric world-view. The more I explore literature, the more I realize just how flawed a novel can be and still hold up. With Rand there are two types of characters and that's all you get: White Hats and Blacks Hats. The White Hats are the heroes, standing alone against an inferior sea of snivelling underlings, incapable of seeing just how magnificent the White Hats actually are. The Black Hats are any of the aforementioned underlings unfortunate enough to show up in the foreground sufficiently for Rand to take notice. Their job it to try to thwart the noble (and capitalistic) ambitions of the White Hats.

On one level this is so much roman à clé, used to support Rand's philosophic darling, Objectivism. And in her mind, I have no doubt, the staring role of Chief White Hat belonged to Rand herself. The problem with literature as rhetoric is that humanity is invariably more complex and flawed than any such Black and White thinking can represent. In the real world, every White Hat riding in on White Horse probably has a whore tied up in the closet, just waiting for him (or her) to stop saving the world long enough to return and do whatever depravity White Hats do when no one is looking. Without nuance, character remains caricature.

And yet the novel works. There are two overarching skills that come into play for novelists. Writing and storytelling. And while Rand is a bad writer she is a very good, if not great, storyteller. (This same argument could be made about J.K. Rowling, save that she doesn't have a political ax to grind - unless you include muggle discrimination in and amongst the wizard world. Also, literary theory doesn't always carry over well between mainstream/literary books and genre writing.) So while Rand's prose suffers from simplistic characterizations and a mind stuck somewhere in deep adolescence, the book itself is underpinned by an engaging story, a phenomenal sense of world and place, and a real talent for plotting that would be equally at home in, say, a book by Rushdie or Pynchon as one by Stephen King or Dan Brown.

By all means, give it a try. Even with its deep flaws I gave it four stars. And I stand by that. Despite her considerable efforts to ruin it this novel has good bones. The only caveat would be for a young person approaching the book for the first time. Please understand that the politics presented here - those explicit and those implied - are untenable when held against the light. Neoconservatism (also confusedly referred to as Neoliberalism) is ultimately an attempt to justify our baser instincts as not merely acceptable and unavoidable, but noble. (For a more adult perspective, check out Ken Wilber, though his novel Boomeritis is lacking in all the places Rand excels. In short, he's not much in the novel-writing department. Luckily he writes mostly non-fiction. Start there.)

If you can see past the sophism, you might just enjoy Atlas Shrugged. You'll also come to understand why Randall Jarrell referred to a novel as “a long piece of prose with something wrong with it.”