Book Review: The Fountainhead

The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand


My rating: 1 of 5 stars

A novel is like a chocolate souffle; it contains only a few ingredients but can be very difficult to make correctly. In the case of the chocolate souffle, the ingredients are sugar, eggs, and chocolate. For a novel, the ingredients are character, setting, and plot. Setting is important, but not vital. Conrad's Heart of Darkness was still good when it was translocated to Vietnam in Apocalypse Now and just about everything that Shakespeare ever wrote has been re-imagined in a different setting (Hamlet set in a pride of lions in Africa, Macbeth set in Feudal Japan, Romeo and Juliet as gangsters in Miami, and so on), usually with results that don't diverge too much from the original. You could even make the case that all a novel really needs are good characters, because in many cases (and in most good novels) the plots arise from the characters and their motivations. For example, if Odysseus had been happy to remain in Troy following the war, then the events recorded in The Odyssey would not have taken place. If Odysseus didn't want so badly to get home, then there would have been no plot and no story. So we have whittled it down to the bare essentials: A good novel has characters with desires and motivations. And unfortunately, even on this extremely generous criterion, The Fountainhead fails to deliver.

First, the writing is atrocious. I will share with you the following passage from the novel and then, will say no more on the matter because this passage speaks for itself. In this passage, Rand is describing a newspaper, published by the billionaire maverick (and self-made-man, who, according to the novel, never received a favor from anyone in his entire life! [I'm not making that up. Not one favor. Ever.:]).

It's enormous headlines, glaring pictures, and oversimplified text hit the senses and entered men's consciousness without any necessity for an intermediary process of reason, like food shot through the rectum, requiring no digestion.
The Fountainhead p 395

700 pages of this.

Second, the characters in this book are little more than crudely imagined ciphers which Rand uses as place-holders for her philosophical ideas (more on this later). The hero, Howard Roark is committed only to the principle that he will do exactly what he wants to do and nothing more. But as it turns out, the only thing he wants to do is 'refuse to compromise.' He doesn't care if his career as an architect is successful. He doesn't care if his designs are ever built and turned into buildings. He doesn't care when his magnum opus, The Temple of the Human Spirit, is ruined. What does Howard Roark want? I have no idea. The other characters are equally baffling. The villain of the novel, Ellsworth Toohey, appears to be motivated only by the idea that talented people should be crushed. He has no personal stake in the matter; but simply wants to make sure that Howard Roark can't succeed. Why? Because Rand was more concerned about making sure that her characters represented certain ideas or attitudes than she was about making them interesting.

You might think that if Ayn Rand was going to forgo interesting characters and plot for the sake of philosophical discourse, that the philosophy would at least be 1) interesting and 2) intellectually defensible. Unfortunately, it is not either of these. Her idea, called Objectivism, is basically the claim that rational self-interest is the highest moral good. This idea is represented by Howard Roark, whose unwillingness to compromise his principles is the principle theme of the novel. Roark sometimes takes the pursuit of his self-interest to uncomfortable lengths, like in the scene where he rapes Dominic Francon, but Rand seems to suggest that Roark's actions are excusable because he is acting out of rational self-interest and anything done in rational self-interest is morally praiseworthy. But frankly, the fact that rape is permissible in Rand's moral system is not the coup-de-grace for her theory of Objectivism. The problem is actually much deeper than this. In her formulation of of Objectivism, Rand presents her theory as if it were true without offering any evidence for why this should be the case.

In a sense, Objectivism is Nietzsche made inconsistent. Nietzsche said (in a nutshell) that there are no objective moral values - there is no such thing as right or wrong - and that each individual must exercise his or her own freedom to decide what sorts of things he or she values, and must then take responsibility for acting according to those values. He calls this ability to create and exert our own moral code, 'the will to power.' Or in other words, according to Nietzsche, we must abide by our own unique principles and values because there is nothing else to rely on. Rand tries to reverse this equation. She says: everyone must create and adhere to their own system of values and doing so is a correct objective moral value. Unfortunately, the only way that her premise seems plausible is if there are no objective moral values. This problematic because it is essentially begging the question. Her argument looks like this: there are no objective moral values, therefore, everyone must live by his own values, therefore, living by ones own values is an objective moral value. She asserts that rational self-interest is an objective moral value because it allows the individual to live and subsequently, makes all of the individual's values possible, as if it were axiomatic, when in fact, she hasn't shown that a person may not rationally prefer to have no values, or even, prefer not to live.

I know many people whose tastes and opinions I respect who like this book; however, I fail to see anything in it. The characters don't even rise to the level of caricature, the plot is a long and jumbled mess that never really got anywhere, and the philosophical insights might seem impressive if you aren't used to philosophy, but any rigorous inspection reveals that the ideas don't hold water. Do yourself a favor and read something else.

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