(Reclaimed from Blogjob. After posting some other things that alluded to this book review, I noticed that I'd not reposted the actual review here...so here it is.)
Title: Atlas Shrugged
Author: Ayn Rand
Date: 1957
Publisher: Signet
Length: 1074 pages
Quote: “We saw that we’d been given a law to live by, a moral law, they called it, which punished those who observed it—for observing it. The more you tried to live up to it, the more you suffered; the more you cheated it, the bigger reward.”
(Note: There's a shorter opinion piece about Atlas Shrugged at http://priscillaking.blogspot.com/2013/02/can-students-be-required-to-read-atlas.html ..)
Ayn Rand grew up in the middle of the Russian revolution. As an impressionable teenager, she saw firsthand how dictatorship, even in the name of Communist ideals, inevitably bred corruption, degradation, and inefficiency. In Atlas Shrugged, she imagined how the process might work if the United States adopted Communist ideals. The result is an evolution rather than a revolution (in contemporary terms), but it’s still bloody.
Atlas Shrugged is classic science fiction, where potential new developments in physics and chemistry form a large part of the plot. Rand’s focus was on the big industries of greatest economic interest in the early twentieth century—metal, mining, railroads, building, and the new fad for automobiles. Although the band of heroes who save the planet include an old college professor, a musician, a writer, and an actress, none of them get very many lines; the plot centers on a rich mine owner’s son, a metalworks owner who’s invented a new alloy said to be better than steel, a brother and sister who inherit a railroad, a genius physicist who's better known as a pirate, and a man who abandoned an automobile factory whose owners had decided to experiment with socialism.
English was not Rand’s native language. As when reading Joseph Conrad, one doesn’t really expect clever turns of phrase (although Rand surprises readers with a few), or the nuances created by selecting the perfect word; one expects clichés, repetition, the laborious struggle for the right phrase that native speakers of English write their way through but try to prune back before publishing, and one is pleasantly surprised that the book is readable.
There are, of course, some near misses. I suspect that, when naming the woman she apparently perceived as a heroine, Rand was under the impression that “Taggart” is a Scandinavian name. It’s Irish, and the combination of “Dagny Taggart” grates on the ear. Of the three men with whom Dagny Taggart sleeps in the course of the plot, Hank Rearden gets by far the most attention, and the most sex scenes...and let’s just say that, as an Irish-American, I find it hard to imagine an Irish couple whose conversations would be so self-conscious, humor-impaired, and grim. Rand was married to an Irish-American and was probably trying too hard not to write about him.
Having mentioned Dagny Taggart, let me issue a fair warning. She is, if possible, harder to like than Howard Roark in The Fountainhead, and that’s saying a lot. Biology may prevent Dagny Taggart from committing outright rape, but she does what a woman can do in that direction. She ignores the lifelong friend who’s always loved her, breaks the mining heir’s heart, and wrecks the metal tycoon’s home merely because she “wants” him. While the metal tycoon is sacrificing the business he loves for the woman he loves, Dagny is preparing to dump him for the man she eventually decides she loves. When they finally flop down on the sandbags in an abandoned railway tunnel and get it on, Dagny expresses her lust for this man (well, in those days women weren’t supposed to speak first) by biting his arm, eliciting an even more “viciously painful” kiss, but what has really warmed her up for this moment is flouncing out of an evening party where a lot of rich men have been hanging on her word, in order to stand up, in her satin gown and velvet cape, and order a lot of laborers to toil all night doing their jobs in the old-fashioned way, which most of them would be too young even to know how to do, before she stalked out and waited for this man to follow. It’s not surprising that, although she plays the role of counsellor and grants a sort of absolution to her sister-in-law (“Taggart” means “priest”), Dagny has no female friends. What’s hard to believe is that, at the end of the book, she has any male ones.
Dagny is credible, and almost human, at the office, where she functions as an old-fashioned railroad man, while her patronizing elder brother degenerates in every scene. She does seem to enjoy running a railroad line—and, unlike the career women in romance novels, to know something about her business, although her knowledge depends on the fictional properties of “Rearden Metal.” Rand convinces us that Dagny loves railroading the way writers love writing.
Other science-fiction devices used in the story are weird new explosives that will remind present-time readers of neutron bombs (only without fallout or radiation), sonic weapons, unexplained breakthroughs in radio technology, and of course the “rays” that shield John Galt’s secret valley, “Atlantis,” from observation by the cruel outside world. Nevertheless, Rand was no scientist, and mainstream readers didn’t dismiss Atlas Shrugged as “merely” science fiction because the plot is mainly about the people; the technology could be changed to set the story either forward or back in history.
The story, in my opinion, self-sabotages in two main ways. The most obvious way is that, although it was written as a trilogy, it doesn’t work as a trilogy. The first third of Atlas Shrugged is stage-setting, and is likely to put readers to sleep if they don’t skip, skim, and miss things they’ll need to go back and look up later. You don’t want to know how many nights I read one or two pages of this tome to put myself to sleep.
A corollary factor here is that Atlas Shrugged is a story about middle-aged adults. Only two people who seem to be under thirty get speaking parts; both of them are perceived by the other characters as children. During the first third of the book, however, what we see are rich older people talking business and not trying very hard to understand their families. This does nothing to prepare young readers for the kind of adventures they typically look for in fiction, nor does it promise middle-aged readers the kind of adventures so many of us have claimed to want to see our age group having in fiction, although the characters eventually get those adventures. One can hardly blame any reader for putting down the book, saying, “Great Trollope’s ghost! If Silas Lapham had been as long as this...” Atlas Shrugged does not read like The Rise of Silas Lapham, at least not all the way, but one can understand how readers might expect that it will.
The other self-destructive tendency this novel has is Rand’s attempt to justify Dagny Taggart at her most repulsive. 1950's nice girls couldn’t, but contemporary nice girls probably can, forgive Dagny for using another man just to relieve her frustration before she decides she’s “in love” with John Galt. (Dagny has only heard of John Galt as a sort of cliché the laborers mention, not a living man, when she whimsically names a section of railroad after him.) Why not Eddie, who’s always been in love with her and never married anyone else? Why Hank, who is married? Because Hank is a conquest; Dagny made an emotional conquest of Eddie before either of them reached puberty, so by now she tends to forget that he’s a man. Hank’s brilliant mind and dedication to his business makes him a prize for Dagny.
Rand apparently wanted to believe that Hank has a right to cheat on his wife, Lillian. Lillian deteriorates, as the plot moves along, from a half-educated, shallow, virginal debutante into an embittered hag. Yes, but Hank had a lot to do with that. Of course the 1970's hadn’t happened yet; every daily newspaper in America hadn’t yet barraged every home with the “news” that very few women, probably including Dagny, would enjoy the kind of sex we see Hank and Dagny having. Still, Lillian makes it obvious, in her first scene, that she’s not satisfied. This was what contemporary audiences understood the waspish “gaiety” of her verbal abuse to mean. Therefore, if Hank were really as brilliant as she’s supposed to be, he should have figured out that she wants something from him, and set aside some small portion of his mental energy for figuring out what that might be. She’s not his equal because she’s not been brought up to be his equal; she’s been brought up to be his student, an empty page for him to write on. That was what her parents thought he would want. If he really were a man Dagny or any woman could admire, he would have accepted responsibility for finishing Lillian’s education, instead of blaming her for being ignorant about business, politics, and sex, and “falling in love” with Dagny. Which, as I think about it, I’m not sure I believe either; in real life, weren’t men like Hank usually scared of women like Dagny?
Before it’s over Hank will of course accuse Lillian of wanting to kill him. By that time she will, but, as a Nice Girl, the closest she comes to it is to have sex with another man, thereby, in a roundabout and contrived way, killing that man’s sweet young wife. (We first witness the wronged wife’s death as an accident, then hear that it’s been reported as a suicide.) Even before the Age of Therapy, was it not obvious that what this couple had was basically a communication problem?
Dagny, as unrepentant homewrecker, actually uses a radio talk show to proclaim that her adulterous fling with Hank “was the ultimate form of admiration for each other...I wanted him, I had him, I was happy,” thereby notifying Hank that his sacrifice for her honor has been worthless to her and the affair is now over. She's ruined his and Lillian's lives; now she's done with him. John Galt, who tells her this behavior was “noble,” is not to be excused as merely another of the men who’ve been hopelessly “in love” with her for years. He is one of them, the lucky one if getting Dagny can be called luck, but he is speaking for Rand. This was the way Ayn Rand behaved in real life. In real life Rand didn’t dismiss younger men as “kids,” either. Though married, she “honored” her male students with sexual favors and the idea that their wives weren’t good enough for them anyway, then dropped them, sometimes after the divorce, as younger and cuter students came along. Nathaniel Branden
, the last younger man to be so “honored,” wrote at some length about how and why this notion of adultery as compatible with personal honor was a mistake.
Then there’s another minor flaw: the world of Atlas Shrugged is demographically unbalanced. (I’ve hesitated to include this paragraph in this review, because I’m not sure how significant it’s meant to be.) Africa and Asia (including Russia) don’t exist. The world consists of North America, South America, and western Europe. All the important people except Dagny are middle-aged Caucasian men. Even Europe has been mostly written off as a continent of passive people, whether their dictators call themselves Catholic, Fascist, or Communist. No character in the book is Asian, Native American, or even noticeably Jewish. No character is positively identified as African-American...but one of the baddies, Cuffy Meigs, has an African nickname, “bleary brown eyes,” and black curly hair. Meigs is the one whose irredeemable awfulness keeps the totalitarians from being able to destroy John Galt’s valley. Other characters, if described, have blond or red hair, blue or green eyes; D’Anconia talks like Tyrone Power’s version of a Spanish-American aristocrat, but he's not described. Rand didn’t completely buy into the racist thinking of the early twentieth century, and wasn’t as impressed by Hitler and Mussolini as many Americans were in the 1930s—she was, after all, Jewish—but if readers wanted to believe that melanin in the human complexion indicated a lower level of evolution, Rand wasn’t going to argue with them. She was a blonde. And she wasn’t trying to impress ethnic-minority readers.
Nevertheless, despite these flaws, Atlas Shrugged has some excellent features too. One thing I like is that, although John Galt and Ragnar Danneskjeld have been preparing for a real war against Jim Taggart, his friends, and their liberal-on-Communism philosophy, and although Hank and Dagny have been suffering psychological torture as they try to choose sides in the inevitable war, Rand finds a way to end the story without the war actually breaking out. John and Dagny won’t have to face off against each other, as they’ve feared, after declaring themselves “in love.” Lots of people have starved, killed each other in riots, or been killed as the industrial infrastructure of America has broken down, but all-out civil war hasn’t started. This plot development deserves celebration.
The best part in the book is the short story a laborer tells Dagny by way of explaining the cliché “Who is John Galt?” Perhaps this story should have been chapter one; as it is, it comes just after the halfway point. John Galt was, in youth, the brightest and bravest laborer in the automobile company that went socialist. The story is about what he walked away from: the way even small-scale, benign, and semi-voluntary dictatorship inevitably corrupts people and their work. (The same group dynamics can be observed in the families of “helicopter parents,” which Rand luckily hadn’t had and chose not to describe—there are no real children in this novel.) The story is compact and readable, and true. Rand had firsthand knowledge; by now many of us share that knowledge.
The main plot of the book, which develops only in the second 500 pages, is that John Galt has a viable plan for ending the gradual totalitarian takeover of America by giving all the talented people a way to secede from America until America learns to want them back. In order to depict the philosophical conflict fully, Rand had to write it as an unlikely piece of science fiction, where the would-be dictators have gained enough power that the talented people have to rely on those “ray shields” to defend their secluded valley. If read as a metaphor for what needs to happen in real life, the thinking through the absurdity of altruism as a value, the recognition that the Highest Good for all does not require conflict between people, and thus the debunking and reintegration of collectivist morality, this primary plot can even be regarded as true.
This central idea could have been a great deal better written, and in fact it was. It was written in nonfiction form—the closest to it in book form, perhaps, being The Conscience of a Conservative
. It had already been written in less direct forms—in the more idealistic versions of American history, in the actual histories of schools like Berea College, in the doctrines of several religious denominations, in the histories of various communes and communities, in a crude form even in the histories of the businesses that began when a clerk or department manager said “I’m not going to wait for the boss to retire; I’ll start my own store and run it my own way.” It had been written in children’s stories; there are recognizable undercurrents of the idea in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House
books, in most of Elizabeth Enright
’s books, in Carol Kendall
’s books and several other favorites of the early and middle twentieth century. Rand, an atheist, wouldn’t have appreciated the link being traced, but the idea of separating from others in order to help the survivors of the others’ self-destructive choices is actually biblical.
As I read Atlas Shrugged and contemplate the paradox of Rand’s life, I can’t help wondering whether Rand just needed to have spent more years thinking, and reading English, before she began writing, or whether her work really was spoiled by her compulsive, reactionary atheism. There was room for love and joy in her philosophy. Why does it come through so badly? Partly because she chose to write about people whose joy in creativity took a different form from writing, which most writers and readers of books can understand, or music or painting, which are close enough that most writers and readers of books can at least imagine joy in those...but not only that. Rand spent so much energy railing against dysfunctional forms of “altruistic love” that she didn’t give herself much time to write about the glory of real love, although the reader who slogs through to the end of Atlas Shrugged will agree that the characters meant to be sympathetic do reach something like that kind of love in the end. The joy of friendship, partnership, synergistic work, seeing and feeling that what is good for one person really is what is good for the other person, pulsates through most of Atlas Shrugged, but it tends to be covered up by rants—especially rants against less perfect forms of love—and smut. When John and Dagny can enjoy a few minutes of intimacy at last, the attentive (and mature) reader understands that they symbolize a return to social connection after a period of separation, but on the literal level they seem to represent just another fling for a rich girl gone wrong.
Rand herself was described by biographers, sympathetic and otherwise, as having much in common with Dagny Taggart. She did stay married, even if it was an “open” (and childless) marriage. She did send money to her relatives who hadn’t been able to emigrate from Russia. She was hospitable, in her way, and had a large circle of loyal friends who have kept her books in print after her death in 1982. It was possible for some people to enjoy her company. Unlike Dagny, she even had a few friendships that weren’t based on sex, a few even with women. In her life as in her novels, she seemed to spend so much time railing against the kind of love she despised, the smother-mothering and guilt-tripping kind, that she found it difficult to say anything about the kind she probably did enjoy. Sad.
So, in conclusion...Atlas Shrugged is a severely flawed book by a severely flawed human being, but if you have a lot of time to kill and are old enough to stand those first 400 pages of society-gossip-type writing about off-putting people whose creative talents probably don’t resonate with you, you will eventually understand why some people love this book. I don’t love it. I don’t expect I’ll ever reread it. Rand spent eleven years writing it, and should probably have spent eleven more years revising it into something even libertarian feminist book lovers could be expected to enjoy. Nevertheless, by the time the plot gets moving, the last third of this novel is a satisfying read. Almost good enough to make up for the time you have to spend in the first two thirds to understand what’s happening in the last third.
