"The Fountainhead" by Ayn Rand: A Review in Two Parts

Part One: The Novel

Before I read The Fountainhead, by Ayn Rand, I thought that there was only one way a book could be “bad”, and that was if it exhibited bad writing in some form or other. Hideous mangling of the English language, unbelievable or miraculous turns of events, bad characterization, stilted dialogue; these are the things which usually cause me to direct my wrath toward some volume. I am pleased, if that’s the right word, to report that The Fountainhead has given me the need to invent a second category of “bad”, since purely literary qualifications cannot completely explain my dislike of this book. It is true that there is one literary aspect of the book which I look upon with the utmost contempt, but that part can only explain at most half of my aversion to the novel.
The book is a long runner, and it would be quite difficult for me to express my opinion in a few sentences, so I decided to review it, in two parts. The first is purely my opinion of the novel as a novel. This is what I think the best literary criticism is: purely personal opinion and evaluation, rather than an exhaustive and as in so many, many cases, misdirected analysis. The second part is my consideration and criticism (lots of that) on Mrs. Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism, as set forth in The Fountainhead. This part will, I fear, be quite a technical piece of work, in that a reader not versed in basic philosophical terms and concepts will probably find himself or herself lost in it. You have been warned. You are also warned that this review assumes that you’ve read the novel, since I will be discussing characters and events therein, although I will try to remain as vague as I can.
The novel’s protagonist is a young man named Howard Roark, recently expelled from an architectural school for refusing to conform to its “old-fashioned” ideas. While all the other architects in the book are worshipers of the accomplishments of past architects (the Greeks, the Romans, the Renaissance Italians, and so on), Roark believes that each individual building or project should be a unique and unrepeated phenomenon. The plot concerns his struggles against the establishment and its clientele as he tries to succeed by doing nothing that anyone has ever done before. His adversaries in the struggle are the traditionalist architects, as well as a critic named Ellsworth Toohey, who pit their full might against him and his ideas. In the end, Roark rises like the phoenix triumphant, his foes are cast down and trampled beneath his feet, and he gets the girl.
As a novel, then, I found The Fountainhead to be functional, and in many respects quite good, with one or two howling exceptions. I should like to emphasize once more that this paragraph is the last time you, dear reader, will hear me say anything good about the book. Mrs. Rand is at her best in her descriptive prose; she has a poet’s knack for using adjectives in strange and unfamiliar ways, and the good sense not to overuse this particular technique. The dialogue is, for the most part, quick and snappy, although towards the end of the book certain characters, particularly Roark, have a tendency to give long, cumbersome speeches lasting some 10 paperback pages or more.
There is one main criticism I should like to make of the novel as a reader, and that is my broad dislike of the characters, both in terms of their qualities and their development. Briefly speaking, all their qualities are repugnant and they do not develop. None of her characters, not even the protagonist, are likeable in any sense, a lack of quality which is especially striking in the protagonist. Howard Roark is an egotistical, uncaring man, as blunt as a sledgehammer; he lacks the wit which makes the antihero (Captain Jack Sparrow and all of his prodigious relations and progeny) so popular in our day and age, and any relationship the reader thinks that he or she has with Roark is usually dashed a few pages after the reader forms the idea. Roark is aware of his repugnance, it seems, and he reminds others that he doesn’t ever give a damn about what they think. In fact, Roark’s emotions are truncated to dislike, and nothing more. He is incapable of feeling love, affection, or any other emotion which connects him to his fellow human beings. He is a separatist in and of himself.
The other characters are hardly more likable. They are either the villains of the piece, with no redeeming qualities (Ellsworth Toohey and his ilk, who are all straw representations of novelists, painters, playwrights, and other artists), or they are those who aspire to be like Roark in all his supremely detached glory, but fail because they still retain the human (dare I say altruistic) connections which Roark so gleefully disdains. Not one of them can be liked. I am an altruist, and yet I found none of the altruists likeable, although I attribute this to their incredibly skewed characterizations, which cause them to revert to the other end of the spectrum as selfish bastards. Thus, the struggles between characters, which is the important part of any novel, comes down to those who are selfish and who acknowledge it, and those who are selfish and don’t acknowledge it.
It’s even a struggle for me to talk about the men and women that populate The Fountainhead as characters rather than as cardboard cutouts, because you would be hard-pressed to call them anything other than the slightly stiffer cousins of paper dolls. They do not develop in any way at all. They remain the same as they do when they are introduced, without even a qualm of reconsideration in times of dire need. This is not how real people behave! Real people struggle with their beliefs; they have, as Saint John of the Cross puts it, “dark nights of the soul”, when all is despair and there is no light at the end of the tunnel because Satan has absconded with it. The people of The Fountainhead do not change one iota in their beliefs from when they are introduced to us, to when they are shuffled off the novel’s mortal coil. They are like Newtonian billiard balls, bouncing off each other and the walls of the story in entirely predictable fashions. They are not interesting at all. They are not likeable, and they are not human.
The characters are what ultimately turn The Fountainhead from what would have been a perfectly enjoyable tale of the swashbuckling hero partaking in struggles against the establishment into a perfectly hateful novel. This is magnified by the character’s strange vulnerability to possession by the author, which causes them to give long philosophical speeches which in no way relate to their positions as they have expressed them earlier in the book. This strange phenomenon occurs only in the last 100 pages of the book, and it was what in the end clinched my decision. Before then I had hopes that Roark would be touched by the milk of human kindness, and undergo some kind of character development before the book’s climax and outworking. These hopes were dashed against the cliffs of despair when Roark embarked on a long, out-of-character monologue, and I put down the book to utter a howl of despair. But I shall speak more of this philosophical firestorm in my next installment.
In summation: The Fountainhead might have been enjoyable, if its characters had not been so utterly hateful and repugnant. Any person who believes in a God of any kind, and any person who believes that we should care about our fellow human beings, will read this book and enjoy it up until the last 100 pages, when it abandons being a novel for being a megaphone for Ayn Rand to blare her philosophies into our ears. I do not encourage you to read it, unless you wish to do so only to understand exactly what she believes. I have found that Atlas Shrugged, which is much the same as The Fountainhead but far less subtle and far more idiotic, is one of the best-selling American novels ever written. Such things boggle the mind, but perhaps one day I shall be brave enough (or drunk enough) to read Atlas Shrugged. Until that fateful day, I take a solemn vow to forswear Ayn Rand, except as an object of my most severe emnity.

-John Ashley