Tag Archives: atlas shrugged

[REVIEW] Atlas Shrugged: Part I

Atlas Shrugged: Part IIf you go down the sidebar over there and click on the tag, atlas shrugged, you will find several blog posts about, you guessed it, Atlas Shrugged, the 1,000+ page magnum opus of Ayn Rand, the founder of the “philosophy” called objectivism. Should you decide not to click that link, I’ll give you the short version: I hate Ayn Rand, I hate objectivism and I hate, hate, hate Atlas Shrugged.

So why am I reviewing Atlas Shrugged: Part I, the film adaptation of the first third of that giant, nigh-unreadable slab of awfulness? Because despite my loathing for everything Ayn Rand and her book stand for, I am fascinated by the subject. I suppose it’s the same way people become fascinated with Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia; these things are just so horrible that you want to find some reason, any reason why otherwise normal human beings would allow them to exist. There are folks out there who look at Atlas Shrugged as nothing less than a guidebook to life. Members of Congress and candidates for president subscribe to Ayn Rand’s insane rantings about how selfishness is a virtue and kindness equals weakness. Hatred for poor people or disabled people or anyone not born into the right situation is an article of faith.

The word “epic” gets thrown around a lot in regard to Atlas Shrugged, but I don’t think that’s a very accurate term. I suspect it’s invoked because Atlas Shrugged is just so damned long, not because it has a grand scale to its storytelling. In most respects it’s an extremely pedestrian tale and the book only becomes remarkable due to Ayn Rand’s odious teachings, conveyed directly to the reader in enormous chunks of indigestible dialogue. One infamous speech in Atlas Shrugged goes on for more than 70 pages, depending on the printing of the book. If you think that’s madness, then you’re already one step on the way toward completely rejecting Rand’s novel.

But if Atlas Shrugged is not epic, then what’s the point of giving the movies an epic treatment by breaking the story into thirds? That’s an excellent question. A ruthless screenwriter could pare down the essentials of the novel into about two-and-a-half to three hours of film and leave pretty much everyone except Rand completists satisfied. Allowing Atlas Shrugged to wallow in its own filth for six hours is taking it too far.

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[REVIEW] Atlas Shrugged

Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn RandIt’s been a long time coming, but I have finally finished Atlas Shrugged. Sure, you can read my thoughts, written piecemeal as I completed the book section by section, but here is where it all comes down to it: the review.

I don’t know how many years I’ve been hearing about this book and how it’s life-changing and how I very much had to read it right now, lest I lose my soul. The drumbeat for Atlas Shrugged has grown even louder over the last few years, as formerly closeted fans of Ayn Rand’s magnum opus have come out in business and politics to try and put a wholly fictional form of economics and politics into action in the real world. Probably the most visible of these people, at least right now, is Representative Paul Ryan, whose vision of America involves shifting the tax burden to the poorest citizens, while simultaneously removing any vestige of a social safety net that might benefit them. It’s pure Rand, pure Atlas Shrugged, and it’s abhorrent.

In a way you can’t hold it against these people for trying to turn our world into Rand’s world. Atlas Shrugged isn’t so much a novel as it is a screed. Its message: only unfettered capitalism works. That this has been disproven time and again matters not at all to those who preach the ideas of Atlas Shrugged. Above all things, Ayn Rand purported to revere reason, but her adherents seem to believe if they just wish hard enough, reality will change to fit their vision of it.

However I’m getting ahead of myself. Sure, the book is a polemic, not a narrative, but we have to at least give as much lip service to the “plot” and “characters” as Rand does.

The setting of Atlas Shrugged is an alternate-history America. Well, history to us, looking back on the 1950s, but more of an alternate present for Ayn Rand. In this America there is no government in a form we would recognize, with the judiciary, legislative and executive branches lumped together into an amorphous mass under a “Head of State.” This government exists as a lone island of quasi-democracy in a sea of Communist states, the last place where business can be conducted in Rand’s ideal fashion, which is for profit above all else. If only there weren’t so many damned taxes to pay!

For the first two thirds of this gigantic book, our main characters are Dagny Taggart and Hank Rearden, both movers and shakers in the business world. Dagny more or less runs a transcontinental railroad headed nominally by her spineless brother, while Rearden produces steel. Well, better than steel: by the sweat of his own brow, he has summoned into being a new metal that’s lighter than steel, but twice as strong. It is creatively named Rearden Metal, and it will make him much richer than he already is.

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Part II complete!

Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn RandA little over two weeks after completing Part I, I have reached the end of Atlas Shrugged‘s second part. I guess that’s not too bad, considering, but it sure seems like it took forever.

Everything takes forever when it comes to Atlas Shrugged. Now that I’m two-thirds of the way through the book I feel I can safely say that Ayn Rand could have cut the book in half (at least) and not lost anything from her story. This is easily the most bloated, self-indulgent book I’ve ever read. And people call it a classic. Heck, the library even put a sticker on the spine that says “classic.” The mind boggles.

I’m hard pressed to even come up with enough of a summary of what went down in the middle portion of the book to fill the word count for this blog entry, the plot is stretched so thinly. In the first third we were introduced to a decaying America, one in which prominent and successful business types were withdrawing from public life and vanishing altogether. That story goes absolutely nowhere in Part II, except that a couple more vanish. No additional clues. No variation. It just happens.

To be frank, I fail to see the point of the book. If it exists only as a platform for Ayn Rand to argue her viewpoint that pure, unfettered capitalism is good and all other forms of socioeconomics are bad, then it’s doing a terrifically poor job. It takes more than lengthy — and when I say lengthy, I mean lengthy — speeches from various characters to create a compelling atmosphere for instruction. Whatever else its intentions, a novel must remain entertaining, and Atlas Shrugged is not entertaining.

The worst excesses of Part I are magnified in Part II, largely because there’s so little happening to move the plot forward. The characters remain flat and unlikable and their situation cartoonish. I know Rand’s intention is to tell the kind of story where, “It can happen here!” but she does it so ham-handedly that it’s impossible to take seriously.

It doesn’t help that her imagination fails her in prominent locations, giving Atlas Shrugged the feeling of something that’s being spun out of whole cloth and not a well-considered literary creation. Take the names of companies: they’re all the same. In the real world we have names like Cybex and Lucent and Comcast and all of that. In Rand’s world, companies come into existence based on the will of a single individual, and so they’re always named for these titans of industry. Rearden Steel. Hammond Motors. Wyatt Oil. If I were a corporation in Atlas Shrugged, I’d be called Hawken Books.

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Part I complete!

Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn RandIt took two weeks and some serious sleepy-time, but last night I managed to reach the end of Part I of Atlas Shrugged. Thick enough to be a book all by its lonesome, Part I has told me an awful lot about the author, her intentions for the book and what I have to look forward to in the next two parts.

Just to bring everyone up to speed, I would recommend they read my initial thoughts on the book, written down after reading comparatively little. You may or may not be surprised to learn that my assessment was not at all off the mark. If anything, the traits Atlas Shrugged demonstrated early on have only become more marked as the book continued.

Where to start? Ordinarily I would take some time at the outset of a review (though this isn’t an full-fledged evaluation), to discuss the positive aspects of a book. Atlas Shrugged‘s good points are so trivial that I could be accused of damning with faint praise, so I’m considering just skipping this part and getting down to all the things I don’t like about it.

Maybe it’s best if I begin with a general recap of what has gone on.

Published in 1957, Atlas Shrugged posits a world not too different from that of the mid- to late-’50s from a technological standpoint, only infused with a sort of paranoiac’s view of nascent socialism. Given that Atlas Shrugged came out during the tail end of the Red Scare, it’s perhaps not too surprising that the book would be flavored by the rich alarmism of McCarthyism. The Russians were coming to get us all back then, and if they couldn’t take us by force, they would overthrow us from within by overwhelming our values with their own. In reality none of this ever happened, but Atlas Shrugged shows one woman’s idea of what might occur if the commies were successful.

The America of Atlas Shrugged is falling apart, as competent people from all walks of life are abruptly retiring from their jobs or flat-out disappearing. Fine manufactured goods are nearly impossible to find. Heroine Dagny Taggart and her railroad, Taggert Transcontinental, is collapsing despite her best efforts to maintain standards and profitability. Our hero, Hank Rearden, struggles under the onerous regulations enforced upon his steel-producing business, even though he’s created a stronger, lighter, cheaper version of steel called Rearden Metal. They are, in the parlance of Ayn Rand, producers. Everyone else is a “looter,” and none of Rand’s upstanding business figures miss an opportunity to refer to them as such.

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