Atlas Shrugged (Mass Market Paperback)

"Atlas Shrugged" lacks even these endearments -- the book is mainly filled with cartoon cut-outs. They might as well be talking to one another with speech balloons. I can't say for sure which is worse, the heroes who chatter back and forth repeating the *exact same philosophy without a single variation* (this, in spite of the author's supposed devotion to individualism), or the uniformly mealy-mouthed villains who have nothing whatsoever to do with their lives but attempt to destroy the heroes. You get two of these for the price of one in those scenes which pit a hero against a villain -- Rand devastates her opponents with clever turns of phrases that are the verbal equivalent of "Kapow!".

What happened? Simply this: Rand ceased to understand human beings. Everything is (either good or bad) ideology to her, and the poor robots in the novel must spout it incessantly. Sex, music, money, marriage, cigarettes, love, religion, a good-tasting hamburger, a train wreck -- all is connected in a total system in her mind, all is reduced to "bare essentials", premises, syllogisms, conclusions. This black-and-white approach is the source of the gray drabness of the novel. Literature, Rand's first-born child, has been immolated on the altar of her intellectual system.

"Atlas Shrugged" culminates in the standard Rand piece de resistance, a speech which turns the plot on its ear by dumfounding all the foes with its unassailable logic. If witty put-downs are the fists ("punch lines") of the novel, The Speech is an atom bomb which, by its simple proclamation, obliterates all opposing thoughts in its blast zone (in "The Fountainhead", this zone is a courtroom; in "Atlas Shrugged", by a plot trick, it is the whole world via radio). This is the "revenge" part of the fantasy -- Rand is smashing her ideological foes. Naturally, the stick-figure bad guys in the novel haven't got a chance after that, and they know instantly that they've been beaten by a master.

The funny thing about a Rand novel is how every character agrees in the end with her *entire* philosophy. First, there are the good guys; of these there are a) child prodigies who always knew it from age nine and never lost sight of it, and b) ninety-nine percenters who aren't too sure if they agree with *all* of it at the novel's start and whose complete conversion to the Truth will be the story's only character development. Then there are the bad guys; those who either a) already know the Truth and are fighting it with all their being because they want to crush the heroes and make mankind their slave, or b) stupidly oppose the Truth while being secretly afraid of it because they know, deep down, that its really True after all. Finally, there is the Common Man who, once The Speech is proclaimed, has found voice for his inarticulate assent to the Truth at last; he expresses a simple gratitude for his enlightenment to the one(s) who delivered it to him. He cannot hope to match the achievements of the heroes, but his spirit is one with theirs -- they have provided him with a firm foundation for life to come.

In this last group we find Rand's fans. These are the people who give copies of "Atlas Shrugged" to their teenage children in the feckless hope that it can serve as a substitute religion -- a guide to higher understanding and moral fortitude. Such is the fate of enclosed thought systems with ideals that lead nowhere. The parallel to Marxist-Leninism is most compelling -- Rand's overtly atheistic philosophy has become its own false god.

I just want to make a point that hasn't been mentioned much in previous reviews: This is not philosophy. Nor is it a fictional exposition of any philosophy. Rand was not, by any reasonable measure of the word, a philosopher. She was a demagogue, and her strengths, if they can be called that, were that she was long-winded and loud. Her writing, here as elsewhere, bespeaks a gaping ignorance of a the whole of philosophy and and a flat inability to *think through* the issues she purports to deal with.

Why is the opposite perception so common? Because she repeatedly *tells* you that she is being rational, is supporting Objective Thought and Reason and Truth. But saying that doesn't make it so. It does, however, make the book very persuasive to people who are easily taken in by slogans and platitudes. Hence its fans, patting themselves on the back after finishing such a big tome, can happily tell themselves that they were convinced by Brilliant, Original Thinking, and Profound Ideas; when in fact they were taken in by merely being told that they had been Rationally Convinced.

Bluntly, you will meet no one of decent intellect--and who actually makes *use* of it--above the age of, maybe, twenty, who gives any significant credence to Rand's ideas. And no one at all who has studied philosophy and does so. There is no intellectual meat here.