The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand

As I wrote a couple years ago, I think Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged is a great novel of great ideas.  I read it and Rand's The Fountainhead between my senior year of high school and my freshman year of college.  I recently reread (OK re-listened to) The Fountainhead and was not as impressed as I remember being 25 years ago.

It's not that Rand isn't a great writer.  In my opinion, she is a great writer of fiction.  Her crisp dialogue, poetic descriptive passages, and ability to tightly weave a compelling story over hundreds of pages of tiny print testify to her skill as a novelist.  But I can't really figure out what appealed to me so much philosophically here.

In the broadest sense, Rand's hero, innovative architect Howard Roark, is a hero I can cheer for.  He stands by his convictions even when it means bucking the world of architecture and losing business.  But in terms of aesthetics, Rand leaves no room for taste.  Whether the medium is architecture, sculpture, painting, or something else, there are technical and objective measures by which a work can be judged, but there is also the simple human reaction: some like it, some don't.  If you produce a work of art that is technically brilliant, but which I don't like, I am under no obligation to praise it, and you are wrong to be offended if I pan it.  But in the world of The Fountainhead, Roark's work is brilliant and correct, while all other architects produce derivative, contemptible trash.  Perhaps my view of aesthetics is overly simplistic, but Rand's is overly exclusive.

Another point of contention I have with Rand is the view of the market in The Fountainhead.  Rand is a hero to proponents of free markets, and rightly so based on Atlas Shrugged.  But in The Fountainhead, market considerations take second place to aesthetics.  If I am a businessman, I make money by selling a product or service that others want to buy.  If I make something no one wants, even though it's a brilliant something, I will go out of business.  That does not make me a hero, it makes me a poor businessman.  Now, if it really is brilliant, hopefully I will find my market niche before I am completely bankrupt, and maybe I will even influence the market.  But if someone is producing something aesthetically bad, and people are buying it, we can criticize the product, and criticize the consumer, but we must defend the right of the producer.  If people like buildings that borrow design elements from several eras, the buildings maybe offend the refined sensibilities of a great architect like Roark, but the architect has the right to design it and the consumer has the right to pay him to do so.  Rand demonizes free exchange between free people of bad taste.  A true defender of free markets would not do so.

Finally, Rand's heroine, Dominique Francon, is horrible.  Even though she admires Roark to the point of worshipping him, she uses her influence to stifle his early career.  Even though she is in love with him, she marries his detestable rival, whom she hates, to--to make some kind of point.  Then she marries another rival to--to make some other kind of point.  All the while she is in love with Roark and looks forward to the time when they can finally be together again.  What kind of sick, twisted romance is this?  Sure, defend Rand, tell me I am oversimplifying Dominque's complex motives.  I just think she's stupid.

Well, this may not be the greatest review of The Fountainhead you have ever read.  But maybe you can see these points of contention I have with the book.  There is much to admire in Roark's steadfastly holding on to his integrity; that is the strength of the story.  But in the process of displaying Roark's brilliance and indefatigable spirit, Rand looks down her nose at anyone else with whom she does not agree and who does not measure up to her standard of genius.