The old girl, still kickin': Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand's massive ideological novel, turns 50

National Review, Nov 19, 2007 by Terry Teachout

That is the way artists talk about what they do, and for all Rand's crudeness, Atlas Shrugged is in this specific sense as much a work of art as Victor Hugo's Les Miserables, the novel that influenced her more than any other. Full-fledged "philosophical novels" are about their underlying ideas, not their stories; Atlas Shrugged, by contrast, is first and foremost a story, which is why people not in sympathy with its underlying ideas are capable of reading it for pleasure, in the same way they might read Pet Sematary or The Firm.

As for the crudity, it's part and parcel of the book's appeal. Because all of the characters in Atlas Shrugged are chiaroscuro-free caricatures, the reader can cheer and hiss them at will without resorting to the time-consuming necessity of wondering whether any of the good guys might actually be bad. You might as well be reading a novel by Zane Grey--except that Rand paints her bad guys with the broad brush of satire, for which she had a rudimentary but considerable gift. I'd even venture to say that some of Rand's politicians, intellectuals, and artists look more like the real thing today than they did in 1957. I especially like Balph Eubank, the fraudulent highbrow novelist who secretly longs to be popular:

"Culture should be taken out of the hands of the dollar-chasers. We need a national subsidy for literature. It is disgraceful that artists are treated like peddlers and that art works have to be sold like soap."

"You mean, your complaint is that they don't sell like soap?" asked Francisco d'Anconia.

Touche--and then some.

SOAP SELLS

The trouble with Atlas Shrugged, artistically speaking, is that it is, as Chambers said, so wholly predictable. Everybody good is very, very good, everybody bad is very, very bad, and everything that happens from first page to last is rigidly, inartfully consistent with the book's initiating premises. The ultimate expression of this consistency is Galt's Gulch, the libertarian "utopia of greed" to which all the best people have removed themselves, there to set up a society (if you can call it that) which exists in order to demonstrate that statism is evil and altruism a snare and a delusion. It is, not coincidentally, a paradise of humorless, obsessive drudges whose combination of self-love and self-absorption reminds me of Earl Long's description of Henry Luce and his magazines: "Mr. Luce is like a man that owns a shoestore and buys all the shoes to fit himself. Then he expects other people to buy them."

Yet it is this very rigidity that explains why Atlas Shrugged has been both so spectacularly popular and so spectacularly influential: Rand turns liberty into an ideology, then dramatizes it in the black-and-white manner of a B western. Randism, like every other ism, is a surefire guide to the perplexed that supplies insert-coin-A-in-slot-B answers to all questions, however arcane. The only difference is that Atlas Shrugged, unlike Das Kapital, also has a plot, complete with sex scenes and a shoot-'em-up finale. Small wonder that it has sold like soap for half a century.