It’s almost impossible to read this book with an unbiased mind. It seems that almost everyone has heard of this book and either loves it or hates it. I have one friend who named this as his favorite book, and I had another friend who blamed this book for ruining her marriage. I have to admit, I didn’t think I would like this book. I’d read THE FOUNTAINHEAD, and found it tedious and pretentious, and I’ve heard enough of Ayn Rand’s objectivism to think it’s a philosophy that seems to appeal mostly to assholes who want to justify their own selfishness.
Let me start with what’s good about this book: This is an excellent argument about why communism sucks. It outlines, step by step, clearly and concisely, exactly how communism makes people poor. She figured it out long before a lot of the eastern bloc countries did, and the publication of this book came at the perfect time in terms of where America was, politically. I think it’s no exaggeration to say this novel had a huge part in keeping America capitalistic. Even its critics should concede that this book had a huge, and mostly beneficial impact on the zeitgeist of the mid-to-latter 20th century in America. If you judge this book entirely on how well it explains why communism sucks, it succeeded fairly well. In fact, for this reason alone, this is a monumental book.
It’s not just a diatribe about economic systems, however, it’s a novel. At least, it says its a novel. It’s structured as a novel. The mood of the book basically feels like steely-eyed statues staring into the distance while their capes flap in the breeze. It has a main character, Dagny Taggart, who has a motivation (save her railroad.) She’s got a thing for the (married) steel tycoon, Hank Rearden. Dagny is pretty much flawless, if your flaws and virtues fall in line with Rand’s objectionism. She’s an attractive (slim, delicate, perfectly poised) heiress who’s also a genius. The men admire her whether she’s giving them orders or coming out in a floofy white dress at her debutante ball. She’s basically a railroad princess who was born to rule, and when the novel begins, she’s a railroad queen. I can admire this. I don’t have anything against rich, powerful people, especially if they try to live up to the overwhelming assets life has granted them. I actually liked the character of Dagny, and I generally wanted her to succeed.
I had problems with Hank Rearden. The guy is a pure, grade A, evil asshole. When we first meet him, he’s at home with his family, who are all presented as whining sycophants trying to waste his time with their pleas for family togetherness. Maybe it’s my own background, but I found this distasteful, because for a certain class of people (namely, women in mid-twentieth-century America) family togetherness is quite an important aspect of life. We’re supposed to hate Mrs. Hank Rearden, Lillian, because she doesn’t understand how much Rearden’s steel mills mean to him, and she keeps trying to get him to pay attention to her. I couldn’t hate her for this. She’s been given a role in life, and she’s trying desperately to fulfill her role. Lillian is in the midst of planning a wedding anniversary party for Hank Rearden, and he just doesn’t care. It’s like she’s trying to run her company (her marriage) and her only employee (her spouse) is a lazy slacker who barely shows up on time. I grew to hate her later, but I began by hating him for treating his wife like annoying flotsam. I wanted to shout at him: Look, bozo, if you didn’t like it, you shouldn’t have put a ring on it. He has a big inner monologue about how he married her because she seemed hard to get, and how he was consumed by his lust for her, only she never seemed into him, and his lust waned. Maybe she didn’t find contempt to be a turn-on. Yeah, so they’re both pathetic broken human beings. I just know that when they are first introduced, she’s trying desperately to make a real marriage out of their union, and he’s barely going through the motions. Also, he’s loathesome. At one point, Lillian confronts him about his infidelity. Hank says if she ever talks badly about Dagny again, he’ll beat Lillian up. A man who threatens physical violence against his wife for basically calling a skank a skank* is the king of all assholes.
I’m pretty sure that this is not how Rand wanted the reader to see Hank Rearden. Rand is pretty clear on how she wants the reader to feel. In fact, she kind of railroads you into it. There are good guys, and there are bad guys, and there are weak people who try to be as good as her heroes but fall short (and either commit suicide or are abandoned in the desert for their pathetic failure). I played a game with myself of marking every time a “good” person was described as having either blond hair or blue eyes. The only exception is John Galt, who has copper-gold hair and green eyes (except a slip-up where it’s described as chestnut). This whiff of master-race ubermenschery goes along historically well with anti-communism, but I can’t say I find it pleasant.
I’m going to spoil the plot now, so if you hate that sort of thing, skip the next two paragraphs.
The government becomes communist and starts imposing regulations that make it impossible to do business. Dagny’s childhood friend, Francisco, goes from industrial mogul to feckless playboy, deliberately losing investor money in pointless ventures and causing financial ruin like the love child of the Joker and Bernie Madoff. Dagny wonders why all the competent men keep vanishing. She and Rearden go on a cross-country trip and find an abandoned factory with a rusty motor. Dagny knows by looking at it that it’s a machine that will draw electricity from the air. She becomes determined to find the inventor. After a fruitless search, she hires a promising young student to re-invent it. He gets close, but then sends her a letter saying he won’t continue, so she flies to see him to convince him to continue. When she gets there, he’s just left, so she follows him to a magical hidden valley where all the vanished competent people are working two jobs apiece in a Libertarian paradise, including Francisco and John Galt. Dagny immediately realizes she’s in love with John Galt, but she can’t bear to leave her railroad, so she goes back to the real world.
Things get worse. The country is starving. Rearden has been blackmailed by his wife to give his steel mills to the government. Rearden says he can’t bear to hurt Dagny, so he does it. Dagny finds out and confesses her affair in a public broadcast. John Galt hijacks a public broadcast to espew his theory, that is, Rand’s theory. People should be paid by how much work they save, not by how hard they work (ie. inventors should get more than laborers). Asking someone to give up something of theirs for the sake of someone else is evil. And of course, the Galtland pledge “I swear by my life and my love of life to never live my life for another person, or ask another person to live his life for me.”
Doesn’t it seem like there should be more plot in 1000+ pages? I thought so too. As a novel, it fails. First of all, it has a glacial pace. Secondly, most of the characters are boring robots. Many of them are described as intelligent, but fail to understand basic concepts that most 5 year olds intuitively grasp, ie. it is important to consider the needs of others. There are “good” characters (rich, successful, usually left-brained workaholics), there are “bad” characters (whiny, sniveling moochers who go on and on about “the public good”) . All the “good” characters are so similar to one another that it was as if they shared the same brain. Rearden and Francisco, for example, make cryptic remarks, and then apologize for imagined slights so obliquely referenced, it was as if there were five hundred pages of intimate Hank Rearden-Francisco d’Arconia love story that got edited out. Francisco goes on about how it was necessary to do what he did, so that he could…what, exactly, I don’t know. Make life suck faster so he could steal the “good” people easier?
I hate the “good” and “evil” dichotomy. Not only is it ridiculous, but it’s puerile and simplistic. It got especially ridiculous when Rand described a train accident, and went over the passenger manifesto, basically explaining that they all deserved to die because they were complicit in the current political system. In Rand’s world, everyone has equal autonomy and power–there’s no such thing as unearned privilege, say, mathematical geniuses who never earn any money because they happen to be born in the wrong country, or to the wrong parents. In this world, Nat Taggart earns his living purely through his own efforts, without the help of anyone or any advantages except his race, class, gender, nationality, religion and education. In Rand’s world, industrial tycoons and rich business leaders never use their money to trounce on human rights. You won’t hear anything about Rearden deliberately poisoning his millworkers because safety equipment didn’t benefit his bottom line. In this world, the Bisbee deportations, Walmart, and the Triangle Shirtwaist factory conveniently don’t exist. Reading this is like listening to a 15 year old talk-show host tell you what’s wrong with the world. There are so many flaws with her half-baked philosophy it’s hard to know where to begin.
Okay, I’ll begin with children. You have to live your life for another person if you have a baby, even if only for a little while. If you want to be a mother, you have to RISK YOUR LIFE for a person you’ve never met. If you are a parent, you have to work to give money to a person who will never, ever pay you back. If you’re childless and think babies are out of fashion, please remember that most members of the subset of “living organisms” find reproduction EXTREMELY important, as in “I will risk my life to do this” important. Babies don’t produce anything but shit and crying. How do they fit into the capitalistic economic scene? And how do stay-at-home mothers fit into it? Rand had such an obvious opportunity here to introduce feminism, like “maybe people who raise kids should be paid for their labor” but she blew it. In Rand’s universe, mothers barely exist. Wives are ornaments of leisure, not hard-working vital contributors to society. Dagny sidesteps the feminist issue by calling herself the man of the family. There are two women in the libertarian wonderland underneath the magic mountain, but both of them have high-status (writer, movie star) jobs, and they also have secondary jobs. She makes a reference to the wives of the Galt-people, and says that they don’t earn money, but they “make up for it in other ways.” Um, does that mean that they charge money for sex? Considering how long-winded she was on everything else, it would have been nice if feminism had been at least addressed.
The misogyny bothered me ever more than the racism did. Rand/Dagny (let’s face it, they are the same person) equates “feminine” with “low status/submissive” so completely, that she only feels womanly by being Galt’s housekeeper. Galt doesn’t call her “employee” he calls her his “servant,” and she’s okay with this. I’m not saying that’s not hot to a certain subset of fetishists, but it’s certainly not universal, and pretending it is kind of squicks me out. Rearden gives Dagny a lecture on how much contempt he feels for her for being willing to have sex with him, which apparently counts as foreplay, because she laughs. (A weird response–don’t worry, she explains it 800 pages later. Sort of explains it, anyway. It’s still bizarre.)
But wait, you’re saying, her philosopy only applies to economics. I don’t buy her rationalization of economic structure either. True, communism sucks, but rampant captialism sucks too. Dagny whines about how all the competent people are disappearing. Where does she think competence comes from? Competence comes from intelligence, education, and practical experience. Intelligence comes largely from adequate nutrition in the first years of life. But in her world, school lunch programs are evil. How can you ask a hard working CEO to buy bread for someone else’s children? (Better a mentally-stunted mob in 20 years than to pay a dime in income taxes now, right?) Universal education is usually government funded as well. (Better have no technicians and doctors in 20 years than pay for someone else’s kid to read!) Rand totally glosses over infrastructure, which is almost entirely government funded. (Who pays for the roads in Galtland?) And even being intelligent and educated doesn’t make you competent if you don’t have experience, but Rearden makes a big point of not hiring his brother for any job at all.
As a novel, it fails. Characters are boring, plot is minimal, and the greatest mystery of all–how the hell are the denizens of the magical hidden valley going to deal with the angry mobs that eventually find them?–was never answered. There’s one sort-of action scene at the end, where they rescue Galt from the albino torturing him in the pit of despair**, but it felt contrived. There’s another sort-of emotionally moving scene where a nameless character with no real connection dies in Rearden’s arms, and I guess Rearden feels bad about it, but it wasn’t like Non-Absolute or Wetnurse (what was that kid’s real name?) felt like a real person.
As a diatribe of a philosophical system, it also fails. Her system is so one-dimensional, it has huge gaping logic flaws to anyone who understands the basic fundaments of human psychology and motivation. Yes, people deserve to be paid equal to their work. But anyone who thinks that money is the only motivation for work just plain doesn’t understand people. Her insistence that non-profit scientists don’t produce what for-profit scientists do is an insult to anyone who ever came up with a brilliant idea that proved economically useless. (Like Einstein, who had a hard time getting hired even after he came up with E=mc2. Maybe if his last name were something gentile, like Taggart…) Plenty of wonderful, amazing human scientific developments were government funded, but maybe Rand doesn’t care that we explored space. Rand, also, doesn’t understand that moneymaking scientific developments rest heavily on the shoulders of the evil “non-profit” scientific developments.
Rand grew up under communism and saw how bad it was, and this book was her answer to it. It’s kind of like someone who suffers with a tee-totalling OCD abusive parent who comes to the conclusion that alcoholism and hoarding must ergo ipso facto be the secret to eternal happiness. Communism talks about brother-love and “the greater good”, therefore caring about other people must be evil. Communism thinks that all men are created equal, so therefore her own heroes are going to prove that rich aristocrats who descend from business moguls are inherently superior. (Paris Hilton?). Communism thinks that pleasant, or at least safe, working conditions are good and necessary, therefore Rand will mock people who build cafeterias and other amenities for their employees. Yes, we get it. Communism sucks, but the exact opposite of communism is no utopia.
It’s also very badly written. I realize that “badly written” is quite subjective, so let me clarify. I consider a novel badly written if the writing gets in the way of the story. I consider a political diatribe very badly written if not only takes too long to make its point, but it doesn’t make the point very well. A good editor could cut 70% of this and not lose any real substance. Francisco’s lecture on how money is the root of all good was kind of nice, but most of the lectures (and make no mistake, they are lectures. No one ever says anything in here which sounds like something a real person would ever say.) are full of non-concrete nouns, lacking examples and anecdotes to illuminate the point, and most importantly, they’re all way too long. John Galt’s 15 page speech could be used in classes to illustrate how to bore your readers.
The only good thing about this book that it explains why communism sucks. Rand, you’re a racist, sexist bitch who thinks that being autistic makes you better than other people, but we at least agree on this point. Communism sucks.
*If you knowingly sleep with another woman’s husband, you’ve basically picked up the “Miss Skank” sash and tiara and crowned yourself.
**”Princess Bride” reference, not a real scene in the book.
