By Ayn Rand
This one was grueling, even listening to the audiobook at double speed. It is SO LONG. It feels even longer. The same verbose interactions happen over and over. The plot and Rand’s message don’t need endless words, but they’re there anyway. It comes across as the immature ramblings of a person who thinks that they are being very clever and since they are taking so long to say something, they must be saying something profound. I’m not a fan of Rand, and I knew that going in. The Fountainhead wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. It wasn’t hard to read. It was odd that she made her hero a rapist, but the pace and the length weren’t so tedious. The characters didn’t feel as thin. A few things stood out during my slog through Atlas Shrugged: great works from the past don’t feel as though they are as old as they are. When I re-read Player Piano recently, I was amazed by how relevant it felt. In Ender’s Game, characters communicated on The Nets well before the Internet took off. It also feels more recent than its actual publication. Atlas Shrugged does not. The focus on industrialists building trains makes it feel very dated. It’s not a world that resembles today at all. Not in technology, not in fashion, not in enthusiasm for cigarettes, not in gender equality. That can be fine. Historical fiction has a place. It’s not a good fit for reality at the time either. Putnam’s The Upswing found the actual state of America to be peaking in the 50s and 60s with American’s at their most collective orientation. Essentially, the opposite of the proposition made by Rand. So, it didn’t describe anything that was happening, nor did it anticipate what would happen. What good is it? I suppose it is a thought exercise on “What if everyone was lazier and less intelligent than they actually are and trains became even more popular in a world with mass produced cars and commercial airlines?” Ok… if you want to go there. I get that she was personally impacted by the communist takeover in Eastern Europe and it makes sense that she’d have a real disdain for anything that resembled that scene. Rand seems to have set out to write the maximally anti-communist novel. It is over the top in its groveling over the heroic capitalists. The protagonist drifts lightly between relationships every time she meets a better capitalist. They don’t mind, because they understand the hierarchy also and as perfect capitalists, they rationally accept their loss. I didn’t intentionally consume them so close together, but Animal Farm was also a recent read. It also takes down communists with simple characters (dopey farm animals). Orwell had the decency of brevity. He had a simple point. Made it. Ended the story. Atlas Shrugged doesn’t add any meaningful depth although it drags for multiples of Animal Farm’s length. The dumb, entitled society that Rand is railing (ha, RAILing!) against has some basis in reality. Although I wouldn’t subscribe to her resulting philosophy, there could have been a tolerable mockery of the looters that conveyed her exaggerated perspective. That could’ve happened in 200 pages. If it was going to drag for that long, there would be room for nuance, uncertainty, characters and decisions that warranted some debate and discussion. Nope. Didn’t bother with that. It also pretends to have intrigue and mystery, but the book is so lacking in subtlety that the next turn is always brutally obvious. “Who is John Galt?” “Who is John Galt?” “Who is John Galt?” “Who created this magic motor?” “Who created this magic motor?” “Who created this magic motor?” “JOHN GALT CREATED THE MOTOR!? NO FUCKING WAY!” The characters were regularly shocked. I was regularly bored. Finally, near the end, the old regime is torturing John Galt and they say that it’s not enough for him to obey, that he needs to be broken to accept their view of the world. It’s the end of 1984. This book is just doing Orwell, but worse again. We still hear “[current day thing] is just like 1984!” Nobody but a dipshit libertarian who didn’t actually read the whole book would say “this is just like Atlas Shrugged!” It isn’t. It wasn’t. It’s not going to be. Sometimes I subject myself to reading chores (The Bible, Dune) just to see what the noise is about. I made it through another one. I don’t recommend it unless you just want to engage in some reading masochism on occasion like me. Oof.