The title of this one's gonna scare most of you off. I understand completely, but if you stick around, you may find something interesting. Or not. Feel free to smack the back button at any time. For those of you who care, this entry will be rampant with spoilage.

I know tons and tons and tons of people hate Ayn Rand. I can't blame you for that. There's the whole weird philosophy thing, she's got a bizarre-ass writing style, there's her choice of subject matter, and everyone who ever read Atlas Shrugged hates it. (The ex read the book to impress some girl, only to find out "Oh yeah, didn't that suck?" Ha ha!)

I personally don't really care much about objectivism. I kinda regard it in the same light as communism- a nice idea, but impractical for living on this earth. I do like the idea that a person could skip the self-sacrifice thing (having watched my mother, the queen of self-sacrifice, I suspect it's not exactly something that makes her happy a good deal of the time.) and live to pursue his or her own goals, but is that really going to happen in this life? Nope, it isn't. People have ties to other people (even Howard and Dominique do, much as they might like to think they don't), and those ties are going to screw a person who tries to practice this up. You cannot be wholly self-oriented in this world unless you live on an island all by yourself, growing your own food, etc. And even then, what happens if someone washes up on your island? So I tend to disregard it.

As for the rest of the above list, well� I'm not gonna deny her style is bizarre. This actually amuses me. A good portion of her characters aren't all that human, which is an interesting idea to ponder, though not at all realistic (not that she's going for realism, though).

I haven't read all of her works. Like I said, I've never gotten around to Atlas Shrugged (I have a free paperback of it, but I haven't touched it), nor have I developed any interest in reading We the Living. I read Anthem and was very much "eh" about it. Though if you ever find The Early Ayn Rand, I actually got a kick out of it (she writes romance, including one slapsticky love story piece). And I have read The Fountainhead.

And I like it. (Ouch! Ooh! Stones hurt!) In fact, when answering that question about what two books would you take to a desert island with you (assuming that I can't pick a title about how to survive on a deserted island), I'd pick that one and Gone With The Wind. They're very long and have odd characters, so at least I'd be entertained.

So anyway, why on earth do I like this book?

I have done all kinds of arts, crafts and design work for a lot of years now. I've taken classes, entered in the county fair and done (and won) competitions, so I've had plenty of exposure to having to please others instead of myself when it comes to my work. And what I have I learned over the course of the years? That the vast majority of people out there who judge work don't like creativity or innovation all that much. Optimally, they want your work to be dull, boring, and simple, with lots of white space and in the colors they like best so that their little heads aren't strained. The more simplistic a project of mine is, the less colors, the less innovation, the better my grades have been. And I find it pretty depressing that the unusual isn't really wanted in the world, at least, not by those who are in charge of it. You can do a little innovation, but not too much. Don't be too unconventional, because that freaks people out.

As you can probably tell from the tone of that paragraph, I find that frustrating, and that's partly why I don't want to pursue a career in the arts. This is why I relate to the story of The Fountainhead so well. I mean, sure, ostensibly it's about objectionism, but the real heart of the story is about a world that wants conventionality, ordinariness, and to endlessly recycle what's been done before. And it's about the one guy who fights back and continues to do the work he wants to do without kowtowing to the rest.

That impresses me no end, even though it isn't likely to happen anywhere but in this novel. In Real Life, some kowtowing must be done if you are willing to get anywhere in the world (see Peter Keating, who does nothing but). I admit that I've learned to kowtow just like the rest of them and do my own thing by myself on my own time. Only the thing with architecture is that Howard literally can't do such a thing on his own time. He needs people to agree with him in order to do what he wants to do, and since he's not so good on the people skills, his work's gotta speak for itself. And it is shocking that he's so dedicated to his principles that he won't take a job that disgusts him, even if he's about to starve and will have to go work in a granite quarry if he doesn't take the job. How many of us would do that? Not a whole lot. I know I sure wouldn't. (Though it's not like anyone other than him was being affected by his decision at that point.)

Anyway, I am impressed by his fight as an artist to do what he wants to do. He's got plenty of disadvantages going for him-being "modernistic" in an age of the recycled, he's "strange and off-putting" to most folks, he's lacking in empathy for most people and has no idea how to schmooze even when he needs to do it, etc., etc. And yet, he manages to take a licking and keep on ticking, repeatedly.

I said earlier on in this that Rand writes characters that aren't all that human. Well, Howard's pretty well lacking in a lot of human characteristics. We don't know much about his origins beyond he seems to be a orphan and he worked his way through school in a lot of areas of building, but we could perhaps infer that he wasn't exactly raised around a lot of people that he needed to please. He's inhuman in his lack of understanding about the general human condition. His focus in life is buildings, and while he has friends and a girlfriend later on that he's generally good to in his fashion, he's not a guy who understands people in general. He has no idea that he comes off to people as cold and inhuman and disturbing, and isn't deliberately trying to do so. On the other hand, he really doesn't know how to not come off that way, either. He has no concept of how most people think, and while he's thought about it, he hasn't gotten anywhere and has generally given up on the idea. I find it interesting how his "inhumanness" helps and hurts him in his career. You've heard how it hurts him, but on the other hand, being inhuman has given him a great deal of resilience. He's sad when he loses something, but as he always says, it only goes down to a certain point. He can handle it and move on without massive trauma, which is a lot more than I can say for most of us (including me and Stephen Mallory). I envy him that, though I do think I'm getting a bit towards that point in my 'old' age.

The only people Howard really understands are the ones who are like him in at least some ways, which are usually either his friends and/or fellow artists. It's interesting how well he manages to understand Dominique (which is why the "rape" scene doesn't really bother me, since he knew that's what she wanted. And note that she never actually said no to his advances, so I'm not sure it actually counts as one.), who I think is THE most fucked up character in literature. Unlike Howard, we really have no idea why Dominique might be the way that she is. She claims to have had a wonderful (albeit boring) childhood, so presumably she was just born with a very odd nature.

While Howard is supposed to be a walking ideal, Dominique and Gail Wynand are extreme idealists. In a way, this is why this threesome works so well together (um, did anyone else kinda hope they'd work out a 3-way marriage somehow? I figured not.) in the later part of the book. Both of them inwardly have EXTREMELY high ideals for mankind, art, etc., and have been brutally disillusioned by life. Or as Rick Bayan puts it, "an idealist whose rose-colored glasses have been removed, snapped in two and stomped into the ground, immediately improving his vision." Only in Dominique and Gail's case, I think they must have had a LOT of pairs of glasses smashed, if you know what I mean. They are so incredibly disillusioned by life that they can no longer bear to see anything that fits their ideals existing in the shitty world they are in. Their way of coping with this pain is to go around destroying these ideals. Gail chooses to destroy people who are ideals, while Dominique sticks to smashing inanimate objets d'art and making sure Howard loses commissions. Which makes them an interesting couple to me. They both are in love with Howard (I dunno if it's a sexual thing for Gail, but he's definitely in love on some level), they both can't destroy him, and they're not completely sure how to deal with that.

Dominique's not a woman who knows how to deal with her feelings effectively, especially when it comes to love. She deliberately picks the most twisted and gutwrenching way to go about dealing with them, hence why she chooses to both try to prevent Howard from working and bonks him every time she succeeds. Fortunately for her, Howard gets exactly what she's doing and why and isn't bothered by it. While he tries to make her understand that she's more hurt by his being hurt than he is, he does realize that she's got to figure these things out by herself. And while he certainly isn't thrilled that her extremely masochistic way of coping with the Stoddard Temple disaster was to go off and marry Peter (and later Gail) as a form of punishing herself, he knows that eventually she'll come back to him when she can deal with things. At that time, she cannot resolve the world of the ideal and the world of the realistic, and she (once again) chooses the realistic because she can't handle what she'd have to do to ensure the survival of the ideal in a realistic world. She'd rather destroy herself and suffer than watch Howard do the same. Or at least, that's how she sees it.

As for Peter Keating, he's the guy whose whole career and life is geared towards fitting in and sucking up to people. In this world, he's highly praised and respected for that. He'll do whatever he can to move up and up and up. Unfortunately, moving up in the world for him ends up requiring that he do more and more things that displease him, and then he has no idea why he's so damn miserable at the top. He gets rid of Lucius Heyer so he can take his spot as firm partner, he dumps the girl he's loved for years when he gets the chance to marry the boss's daughter, and the more he sacrifices his character, the more pathetic he becomes as he rises.

The sad thing about Peter, as seen in this book, is that he starts out with a slight tendency towards, dare I say it, Roarkian originality. He sacrifices that because it certainly wouldn't help him in his career, and he tends to scorn Howard for not doing the same thing, but deep down he is quite jealous of the man. It's a total love-hate relationship between the two, which is interesting to watch. All of the acclaim and money in New York doesn't seem to convince Peter that he's a better architect than little old Howard who puts up one building at a time. After awhile, it's obvious that Peter's hating architecture and no longer has any idea what to do with his work, so he goes to Howard to get him to do it for him. Howard's got his own reasons for helping Peter out (he can't stand to see the messes Peter turns in and feels compelled to clean them up, he wants the Cortlandt project and can't get it on his own), but I suspect part of his helping is pity for Peter in the end. He cares about the guy to some degree (God only knows why), but can't help that Peter's chosen the road that he has.

Going back to Gail Wynand, this is the fellow that Rand leads you to believe is going to be the bad guy in the book. You don't see him much in the first two sections, but you do know he runs a crooked operation and treats people like crap. And yet upon meeting him, you find out this guy would like to kill himself. That gives you pause right there.

I think Rand had to wait to introduce him into the story more than that because she knew that the more you found out about him, the more you'd find out that he really isn't the bad guy. Surprisingly, he isn't one, no matter how much he'd like to give that impression and tries his damndest to be an ass. Gail's character is all about the element of surprise, deep down. Who would have guessed he'd be so similar to Dominique? Who would have figured him to fall for Howard like that? Who would have thought you'd feel sorry for the man? And I like him for that.

So who's the real bad guy in the book? Why, the Great Humanitarian himself, Ellsworth Toohey. I'm not going to go around detailing everything he does because that would go on for even more pages, but I like how Rand alternates between trying to make him sound good and his secret evil side, but does manage to hide his motives for a long period of time. Would you have figured this guy was after world domination? A little puffed-up newspaper columnist has that much power? Yup, and that's because people have given it to him. The best way to defeat this guy? Don't give him a forum, don't give him a second thought. Do what you're gonna do.

This novel makes me think about the world more than nearly anything else I've ever read does. (And obviously, in great detail.) I tend to be attracted to books that involve a lot of mental mindfucking and twists and turns, because they tend to blow my head off. The detailed processes that go on in this book, the twisted personalities, the battle of mediocrity vs. superiority (kinda communist, really)� you have a lot to think about by the time you're done. That is, if you haven't thrown the book out of the window in disgust. It may be unrealistic, it may have crackpot characters and an odd philosophy, but it's not a book you read, think "Eh," and forget about ever after. You love it or you hate it, but you're probably not going to feel neutral about it, and you'll definitely have strong opinions of it. How many books do that to me? Not many. So this one will always stick in my head for that.

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