buffoonery's Full Review: Ayn Rand and Leonard (AFT) Peikoff - The Fountainh...
And I will howl at you if you take this bloated tome too seriously. I mean, the hero is a rapist and the female lead a self-loathing adulteress. Enough said.
A favorite of sophisticated high schoolers everywhere, Ayn Rand's "The Fountainhead" is actually a pretty fun parody of a novel if you can just separate the wheat from the chaff. Be advised: there's a lot of chaff (or other less pleasant detritus), so bring your shovel, if you get my drift. The plot is engaging and the battle lines are clearly drawn between the good guys (individualist capitalists) and bad guys (collectivists and socialists). Who cares if the prose is wooden, the characters cardboard, and the outcome never in doubt?
Rand tells the tale of Howard Roark, (a misanthropic architect loosely based on Frank Lloyd Wright who is an absolutely terrible businessman) and his struggle against collectivism. Matters begin when Roark gets thrown out of architectural school for failing to carry out a simple class assignment, thus establishing the insubordinate attitude that will accompany him through the rest of the novel. He gets a job with a failing but superb architect (loosely based on the famed Lewis Sullivan) and one thing leads to another until, having been reduced to a day laborer in order to make a living, he meets up with Dominique Francon, the improbably-named journalist daughter of a well-known architect (based, as Rand said it herself, on Rand having a bad day, except the daughter is good looking and shapely, and Rand was chunky). Naturally, Roark promptly rapes her. She, not having attended feminist self-awareness sessions, responds by carrying on an adulterous affair with Roark, making cuckolds out of not one but two successive husbands, one of whom was Roark's college classmate who has made a career out of stealing ideas from Roark.
Roark's career has its ups and down, mostly down (primarily because he refuses to drum up business), until he is manipulated into designing a Temple of the Human Spirit (loosely based on the Unity Temple that Wright designed in Oak Park, Illinois). This design becomes a cause celebre in the press, which is led by a local media magnate named Gail Wynand (very loosely based on Charles Foster Kane-I mean, William Randolph Hearst). Roark's career heads further south as Wynand marries Dominique (the strength of Wynand’s character being in direct proportion to the pleasure he provides Dominique in bed). (Note: an adulteress herself, marital misconduct never bothered Rand.) Roark also is attracted to Wynand and there is an interesting unrealized love triangle with some homerotic overtones, whether deliberate or unintended is up to the reader to judge.
Time goes by and Roark's reputation is gradually established; it's fun to watch Rand steal buildings that Wright actually designed, like the little kind of circular gas station and some of the industrial projects like the Larkin Building in Buffalo.
Ultimately, however, Roark designs a low-income housing project for his now-failing classmate. The design is altered without Roark's permission and Roark, being a man of both principle and action, naturally blows the building up. Public opinion, led by columnist Ellsworth Toohey (very loosely based on a combination of Drew Pearson and Walter Winchell, with perhaps a dash of the malignant liar Walter Duranty thrown in), turns against Roark, but he wins the trial and makes an honest woman out of his mistress.
If you haven't gotten the point already, this is a book-length cartoon, not a real character or human situation anywhere; there's enough cardboard in here to ship the Empire State Building overseas. The book is relentless and almost entirely humorless--any gags are unintentional, I assure you. The whole thing is an excuse for authoress Rand to vent her philosophy of objectivism and unbridled capitalism. So listen closely: Rand is often mistaken for a conservative. She is not, and denied it herself to her dying day. Indeed, she loathed the traditional right, Bill Buckley and the National Review specifically. She is also a militant atheist and continually mocked as mystical the Christian elements of conservatism. Edmund Burke she is not.
On the other hand, Rand has an undying contempt for the left and socialism, and you have to give her credit for that. (Kind of like saying about Stalin, you know he was pretty tough on the kulaks, but you got to give him credit for being a Russian nationalist. Except that Stalin was a Georgian, so maybe that doesn't work.) The leftist figures in the book are continually and effectively mocked, even when they're just talking out of balloons on a storyboard, all except for Ellsworth Toohey, a genuinely evil and fully fleshed out follower of Mephistopheles. Toohey is perhaps the best realized character in the book, a real bad guy.
Despite its many flaws, the book is a good read. It's also a good starting point for nascent right-wingers, and when I say nascent I mean nascent. Rand's philosophy is not particularly rigorous and her knowledge of economics does not go beyond that of unrestrained laissez-faire. She really doesn't add anything to the debate, and this book will convince no one who hasn’t already made up their minds. Read "The Fountainhead" when you're young, then move on to some writers with rigor, like Friedman, Hayek, and Kirk.
Published in 1943 or so, "The Fountainhead" was later made into a mediocre movie starring a badly miscast Gary Cooper as the hero and a really badly miscast Patricia Neal as Dominique Francon. It's amusing to watch as a period piece, but not much else.
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