Fountainhead

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Summary: How to read The Fountainhead without tearing your hair out
Review: There's no question that The Fountainhead presents some fascinating ideas. But the book is also infuriatingly inept: it's written in a tired melodramatic style, the characters are unbelievable (especially the love interest, Dominique), and worst of all it is way, way, WAY too long. This last fault is particularly unfortunate because many of the book's most interesting passages come in the final 200 pages.

Having forced myself to wade through the entire thing, I have a recommendation for future readers. I suggest that you begin by reading the speech made by the book's hero, Howard Roark, to the jury in a climactic trial scene. (It takes up about 8 pages in Chapter 18 of Part 4.) Although the speech is put in Roark's mouth, it's clearly unfiltered Rand, and it lays out her philosophy and the book's point. The rest of the novel is simply an illustration of that speech. Once you've read the speech, you can go back and speed through the rest of the book, seeing how Rand envisioned her ideas in practice.

The 2005 Centennial Edition of The Fountainhead contains as an appendix a useful small selection of Rand's notes for the novel (showing, for example, what she saw each character as representing). A second appendix provides an introduction to Rand's belief system (Objectivism), but Roark's speech covers much of the same ground more entertainingly.

It should also be pointed out that the Centennial Edition is missing lines of text in at least two places (one being the end of Chapter 11 in Part 1). I guess it's a sign of Rand's repetitiveness that even the copy editors -- folks who are paid to be bored -- stopped paying attention after a while.

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Summary: Her Best Book
Review: I really enjoyed this book. I had been meaning to read it for some time, and in the barracks I was staying in (I am a reservist called back to active duty in the army) I found it in a locker. I immediately read it and liked it so much I purchased several of Rand's other books.

The premise of the story is one man's unwillingness to compromise his work for the tastes of the general public. He would not conform, and he would not waver in his beliefs, regardless of the personal and professional set backs they caused him. He was an architect and created buildings of a type that had never been seen before. The "masses" didn't know how to take the radical new design and they waited for the critics to tell them what to think. What results from this is actually the more interesting story, that of the antagonist Ellsworth Toohey, a very cunning, dignified man who undertook as his mission in life controlling the thought of the people.

Unlike Atlas Shrugged, the characters here have a considerable amount of depth and complexities. Rand dedicates ample space defining the characters and giving you an insight into previous life changing events, which is something she neglected to do in Atlas Shrugged. No character is pure of either defects or attributes. This makes for very intriguing story.

One draw back, as outlined by previous reviewers, is the unlikely conversations held between the characters, or "speeches" as one reviewer put it. But, as in all of Rand's fiction writing, the story is a mere means to the end, and in this case the end is a homage to the power and creativity of the individual. There may be a way to have expressed it in witty banter between characters, but I am not sure it would exhibit Rand's points more clearly.

Overall, it was a very enjoyable book, both for the philosophies it expounded and for the story itself.


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Summary: It would make sense, if its architecture did.
Review: There are two problems with this book: its architecture and its main character. I'll start with the second.

The hero of The Fountainhead is autistic. Rand's description him proves this in abundance, even if this was not her intention. He is in the room but not in the room, he looks at you but not at you, he is committed to the projects in his mind but has no clue what goes on in the minds of others or what clients could possibly want. Look up autism, read this book, then tell me I'm wrong.

Back to the first problem. The model of architecture in this book has proven itself unreliable over time, as Stewart Brand notes in How Buildings Learn. Modernist buildings leak, handle the weather terribly, and are generally hated by their occupants. Since, in theory, the artist began with his own idea of the function of the building rather than its actual, daily uses, this is no surprise. Since the celebrated idea in The Fountainhead is an autistic inability to understand the client and building dwellers, Roark's buildings would undoubtedly suffer the same fate as all other modernist buildings. Frank Lloyd Wright, the model for Roark, built flat-roofed houses in the snowy midwest, for example. Brilliant! Such buildings, though admired on the outside, are despised by the people who occupy them and the maintenance teams that take care of them. As Brand notes, though, over time, "function melts form." Thank God. Thank God architectural time time itself has proven Rand's thesis on autistic, modernist genuis untenable!

A final problem should be noted. The model of humanity in The Fountainhead isn't really all that rare. An uncommunicative, emotionally enclosed engineer? Wow. How novel. Sound like any husbands you know, Silicon Valley?

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Summary: Ramblings on Ayn Rand's Works
Review: FountainHead and Atlas Shrugged are two books, especially the former, that have gained the status of Modern Classics. The thoughts expressed below are, well, my general thoughts on the two most popular works of Ayn Rand.

After I finished reading FountainHead, the character that impressed me the most was Gail Wynand, the next being the iconoclast Ellsworth Toohey. I found the final monologue, if monologue is the word I am looking for, of Toohey to Peter Keating and the defense of Roark(for those who have not read the book, Howard Roark happens to be the Hero of Fountain Head) in the climax the most impressive parts of the book. It is definitely a book that is a must read for any bibliophile worth his salt. In fact, each of the characters sketched out by the writer in Fountain Head have something definite and unique. In stark contrast to this, Atlas Shrugged has most of the characters, the Heroes of the book, very similar to one another and after the point to be put across is put across, the theme repeats itself again and again and the writer tends to get excessively didactic. I must, at this point, confess that the 90-odd page radio speech by John Galt, in Atlas Shrugged, took a lot out of me, leaving me practically a spent force by the time I finished the Chapter ''This is John Galt speaking''. The sheer size of the book Atlas Shrugged is very intimidating. Anyway, I managed to read that, spreading it over a period of nearly four months.

Ayn Rand happens to be one of the most compelling and influential writers I have ever read. Though it is highly difficult to rise up to the standards set in her philosophies they definitely influence the reader immensely. The philosophy she professes though hard to live up to and emulate definitely sets standards to the way an ideal man has to live. I do not presently remember, but a writer or critic once pointed out that after reading Fountain Head, one would feel that the rest of the writers through the generations have written their works while sitting on the potty or something to that effect. Though I would say that saying so is going a bit too far, it definitely gives an idea as to how powerful Ayn Rand's writings are.

Delving for a while on the cover illustration of FountainHead, I have this little theory of mine that it shows the picture of the Titan Prometheus from Greek Mythology, stealing fire from Gods, which, as the legend goes, he gifts to mankind and for doing so Zeus punishes him by chaining him to a rock and leaving eagles (another version says it is vultures) to gnaw at him. The illustration in a way, I think, encompasses, or is symbolizes the word I really am looking for, the idea of the Creator, the first to go on an un-laid path only to get pilloried, inviting the world to point the finger of disdain and scorn, the idea Roark so convincingly presents in his defense.

In Ayn Rand's own words, the philosophy of objectivism sums up to this:
''My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.'' In a nutshell, one sees the Earth in the eyes of Ayn Rand as a place where there is no room for those wallowing in mediocrity. Well, that, if you practically look at, sends most of us packing to the outer space with a copy of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy; but then, that is neither here nor there. The nearest antonym to ego, according to her, is altruism. Her theories severely pan the concept of Collectivism and glorify Individualism and the Virtue of Selfishness. In this context, it doesn't need a rocket scientist to understand her views on Soviet Communism vis-a-vis American Capitalism. It would be of interest to psychologists to know that the writer was a Russian immigrant to the United States.

The Ayn Rand Stereotype:
Ever observed? All her heroes have to possess lean frames with athletic builds and angular faces (Hank Rearden, Francisco d'Anconia, John Galt, Howard Roark). All the bad guys should be fat with flabby masses of flesh falling off their bodies (Peter Keating, James Taggart, Ellsworth Toohey et. al.). All her heroines (Dagny Taggart, Dominque Francon) have to invariably sleep with all her heroes. Of course, in pointing out the last observation, i don't mean to say that Dagny Taggart from Atlas shrugged goes out all the way to sleep with Howard Roark who appears in FountainHead.

PS: Err... possibly this review is more comprehensible for those who have read Ayn Rand's works.

Rating:
Summary: The prose is simply brilliant, as for the philosophy....
Review: Even if you are wary of Ayn Rand's black and white portrayl of the world (i.e. her insistence on equating capitalism with good and socialism with evil) the Fountainhead can be a genuinely inspirational and moving book. While it is written in the style of the great Romanticists, with some of the character's dialogue being outright laughable, it made certain aspects of Rand's philosphy less convulated and more appealing. Although I think it was only her skilled style of writing which allowed me get past the horrific rape scene and the long winded speeches of the main characters.
As a final note, I agree with one the other reviewers on here, about how this book actually made him more religious. I've always felt that I had a rational understanding of my religion, and perhaps it is not too ironic that an atheist rationalist like Ms. Rand provided me with an even deeper appreciation of it. Read this book, you'll certainly get something worthwile out of it.