B.W.'s Book Report: The Fountainhead

Depending on how much time I have left, I suspect this fall will be one of those watershed moments in my life - I believe I will be able to measure the difference made by my reading The Betrayal of the American Right, Out of Step and The Fountainhead in quick succession.

These will be random thoughts over a beer less than an hour after finishing Ayn Rand's famed book. I haven't read the afterword or other commentaries in hopes I can capture my first thoughts more or less untarnished, so I suspect some of this will be old hat to longtime Randians and others familiar with the work. If you haven't read the book and want to someday, there are a few vague >>>SPOILERS<<< below. Fair warning.

There's a black-and-white dynamic at work here - individualists versus collectivists - but two of the five major players are gray. It's the story of two pure individuals, Howard Roark and Dominique Falcon, and one pure collectivist, Ellsworth Toohey - one of the smarmiest and most evil villains I've ever encountered in literature. Then there are the in-betweeners, Peter Keating - who immerses himself in the collectivist world while jealously admiring the individuals he hasn't the will to join - and Gail Wynand, who makes millions catering to the collective while asserting his powerful individualism in private.

The black-and-white characters land on their feet in the end. I so wanted Toohey to be crushed and humiliated, but he merely fails to crush Roark and Dominique. Keating and Wynand, on the other hand, remind me of (of all things) the passage in Revelation about the church of Laodicea: "because you are lukewarm - neither hot nor cold - I am about to spit you out of my mouth." Life spits out Keating and Wynand, punishing them for trying to live in both worlds.

I think Rand is an intriguing thinker. And she has created some compelling characters. I don't know that the novel needed to be 700 pages, and the main reason is the tendency for these characters to bog down into philosophical speechifying. Toohey, for example, has a lengthy speech to Keating towards the climax in which he explains all of the devious machinations that he's perpetrated over the past 650-odd pages. The attentive reader has long ago figured out what Toohey is up to, and why - the scene has the feel of the clichéd speech by the villain ("So you want to know how I'm going to rule the world?") that gives the hero time to wriggle free of the knots so he can punch out the bad guy and save the day, except that Keating doesn't wriggle free.

But while the speeches make for tough sledding along the way, it's an entertaining ride for the most part. And Rand spells out in black and white the nature of the media bread and circuses that continue to this day. When I signed on to write this little entry, I was greated by Yahoo! news stories about UFO sitings and "Britney's retirement plan." It's a bit disconcerting to recall that the same thing was happening in 1943, but not unexpected.

To paraphrase a magical line from As Good As It Gets, this book made me want to be a better man. The stuff it says about the nature of creativity and the importance of one person's vision in the artistic process, that stuff is priceless. It makes me want to go write another Great American Novel, compose a symphony or two, and otherwise exercise my muse to death.

This intense period of exposure to Rothbard, then Chodorov and now Rand has shifted a great number of synapses in my brain. And that's a good thing.

And on a baser note, Dominique Falcon is hot. Patricia Neal played her in the 1949 movie? Yeah, that might work ...