Well, I’m not saying writing long books is BAD, but yeah…750 is, objectively, long for a novel. If that’s considered short, then what’s long? A thousand pages? Very few books really need to be all that long, honestly. I can only think of a handful that made it to that length.
Anyway, it’s kind of hard to take anyone seriously who thinks that a grin is the mark of an idiot. I also can’t help but think of liking The Fountainhead as a mark of evil despite never having read it. The “evil” character in Dirty Dancing, Robbie (well…evil in that he knocks up a girl and then takes no responsibility for it, assuming everyone should in true Randian fashion stand on their own two feet) likes the Fountainhead and is a complete douchebag about it, too.
I dunno, but that’s definitely a message Rand sends in The Fountainhead – that leftist politics is not about the workers vs. the owners, but about mediocrity vs. excellence. Toohey embodies that view, consciously. He patronizes a group of artists who are indeed nonconformists, but also entirely mediocre; true excellence, represented by Roark, is the enemy in his sights.
I have to disagree with the “grin is the mark of an idiot” interpretation. The relevant line from Fountainhead is (to the best of my recollection) “Have you noticed the imbecile always smiles?” (emphasis added), which is quite different.
The character of Francisco D’Anconia, one of Rand’s Alphas, grins quite a bit in Atlas Shrugged.
Yeah, I meant to go back and change it to, not that long. It isn’t short, but it really isn’t long. It’s 750 pages the same way part 4 of Harry Potter was 750 pages. It’s relative. Like I said, read it if you are interested. I don’t care for Rand’s politics myself, but her writing isn’t as bad as people say and the Fountainhead was surprisingly entertaining in a bizarro world sort of way.
I never will understand why Rand seems to hate women so much.
I must be the only person on earth who enjoyed both The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged as works of light fiction. In both cases, I ignored the message, and found the stories entertaining, particularly since I’m a fan of dystopian science fiction. I’m not sure why nobody seems to consider Atlas Shrugged in that category, but I think it fits. Maybe it’s more “speculative fiction.” (I’m not necessarily sure of the difference)
Yes, her prose is incredibly clunky, her characterizations suck, and she is ridiculously long winded. I still liked the books.
Fair enough. I will agree that Rand might have thought that people believed this. But I have never met anyone who thought that the world would be a better place if we all just tried a bit harder to be mediocre and took less responisbility for our own actions. Maybe it’s an anti-comunist thing that I am missing?
I disagree. Like gaffa, I enjoy reading P.J. O’Rourke although I don’t agree with his politics at all. On the other side of the fence, have you ever read Anna Karenina (or was it War & Peace? I really should be able to tell them apart)? There are portions of that where Tolstoy goes on and on about the greatness of communism, and as a leftist (not a Communist, but I can’t recall reading any other novels that beat me over the head with a left-wing message) I found it boring as all fuck.
Oh, and put me in the “Don’t bother to read Rand unless you’re between the ages of 13 and 15” camp, too. I don’t know how any adult can take her seriously as either a writer or a philosopher.
So you’ve never seen (or been) a nerd who got beat up in high school?
One trivial detail that stayed with me for some reason was in Atlas Shrugged during the trial of Hank Rearden. Charged are read and he makes an opening statement:
“I do not recognize the right of this court to try me.”
“I beg your pardon?” [asked one of the judges]
“I do not recognize the right of this court to try me.”
Though Rearden’s lines were identical, they weren’t (in my copy) of identical length. The character spacing varied slightly, for no apparent reason.
Which, I mentioned, I recognize as an artifact of where she’s coming from in setting up the story (this side, GOOD, that side, BAD… even down to physiognomy) – but my point is it DOES put off the modern reader, accustomed to flawed heroes he can identify with (I know, AR would say if you’re flawed then you can’t be a hero… :rolleyes: ) and it also puts off some persons otherwise receptive to the message if everyone in the story who “gets it” is portrayed as already being morally heroic (and physically smokin’ hot – 'tis the one thing about the idea of Angelina-as-Dagny that’s somewhat redeeming ) .
BTW, as others have mentioned, Rand is not unique in being longwinded and laying the ideology on thick… IMO it’s that specifically in regards to AS, the whole “most influential book in people’s lives” word-of-mouth leads people to expect something else out of all those pages. Many start thinking, *“that’s IT??” * before they get halfway through.
That also prevents them from going into it as simple spec fiction, as Green Bean mentions. FWIW, in that sense, anyone sitting down to actually read the other, more widely published, “most influential book in people’s lives”, the Bible, will also find him or herself facing page after page of arid genealogies, geographies, “just-so” stories, episodes that seem to have no point, repetitions, important events involving half a lifetime being taken care of in one tenth the space as other events involving one evening, in between the passages that make the point – at least with the Bible we have the excuse that with several dozen authors/editors scattered over centuries, one expects that.
But this makes my point. I wasn’t comparing her to O’Rourke. I’m not saying she’s a good writer. What I’m saying is that there are other, equally bad writers who get a pass on their deathly dull writing style because their themes appeal to critics and intellectuals. Your Tolstoy example is exactly what I’m talking about - Tolstoy is revered by modern academia. There are many other examples of this. Rand seems to get singled out for extreme hatred and derision, and I’m willing to bet that a good part of it is that the ‘serious’ critics almost universally hate her message.
I read “Atlas Shrugged” as a teenager - I really enjoyed being exposed to the new ideas in the book that I had never encountered before. I wouldn’t completely dismiss the importance of this, at that age. I’ll have to go back and re-read it as an adult; maybe it will have lost all of its excitement for me now.
As for long-winded writers, I skipped portions of “The Lord of The Rings” when I read it a couple of years ago, too - Mr. Tolkien had a tendency to rhapsodize about every blade of grass in the forest at times. I guess we just do our own editing when the real editors fall down on the job.
Her sense of humor: She did smile, she did laugh, she even danced around to her silly “tiddly-wink” music. And it was Rand, herself, who dubbed Allan Greenspan “The Undertaker,” only partially in reference to his black trenchcoat.
And her writing style: she wrote exactly as she spoke; the only thing missing is the Russian accent. When I read her writing, my mind’s voice is always hers.
And as far as her message is concerned: Don’t forget that AS was written over 50 years ago, and it was a very different world than today. Communism was a very real threat, and so was the religious establishment (far more widespread than today’s Religious Right). AS was written to combat both. If you “get the message” in only a few pages, it’s because you’ve heard the message before . . . thanks to Ayn Rand. Believe me, when AS was written, it took 1,168 pages to get the message across. And Galt’s speech was extremely radical for the 50s. Nobody was saying that individualism was good. Nobody was saying that capitalism was ethical. Nobody was saying that sex is good and a beautiful woman can run a railroad, and that money isn’t the root of all evil. You’ve heard it all before, because Rand said it first.
[hijack]Heh. Why do I think the late Bill Buckley would take exception to the idea that it was Rand that stopped civilization’s headlong fall into collectivism… [/hijack]
– 'tis the one thing about the idea of Angelina-as-Dagny that’s somewhat redeeming 
) .