Judgment Day: My Years with Ayn Rand. - book reviews

National Review, August 4, 1989 by Joseph Sobran

And she was one of the great cranks: she did her own thinking, ftom the ground up. People like that often have powerful, original, but not terribly well-balanced minds. She regarded herself as a great intellectual pioneer, but she expected the public to embrace her as soon as she had shattered its most cherished beliefs and sentiments. Nobody knew quite how to take her, and she would permit only one way: on her own terms. Branden did so until he realized he had compromised himself by living so long under her spell: he calls her a "sorceress of reason."

Branden has few good words for his friends of those years; he clearly regards the whole scene as morbid. But it has left its traces on him; his prose still has the ring of Objectivist kitsch, overworking adverbs like "profoundly" and "passionately" to heighten the sense of drama or lend a touch of gravity. Since the split, he's also acquired a layer of California psychobabble, as when he observes that his second wife was "in touch with her feelings." But he is perceptive enough to make his portraits of people, especially the unflattering ones, sound like plausible psychological diagnoses. (Though they can't all be that bad.)

Judgment Day might be a slightly junky book, except that Ayn Rand is such a terrific character-a woman drawn in equal parts from Wagner and James Thurber. Branden foreshadows the climactic scene heavy-handedly, but when it comes, the floor shudders, the chandeliers sway, and plaster drops in great chunks from the ceiling. When this woman lost her temper, Stalin would have dived for cover. If you're interested in this sort of thing, you probably ought to be ashamed of yourself, but you won't be disappointed.