The Fountainhead

The Fountainhead Ayn Rand 704 pp.

Ayn Rand’s paperweight of a novel, The Fountainhead, drags on through seven-hundred pages of monotonous pontificating by one-dimensional characters. Objectivism, as presented through the novel’s protagonist Howard Roark, is the philosophy of sticking to one’s own thoughts and desires at the total and complete expense of every other human being on the planet.

The novel quickly establishes a structure it will fall back on later in the text: Roark, an architect, is given a commission or some other means by which he may see a building he designs brought into the world. He attacks the challenge with gusto, deriving great, visceral pleasure from solving the problems of materials and the site, until he comes to what he, and he alone, has determined as the perfect solution. From that point hence, he will only allow the building to commence if his vision is left untampered with. The slightest modification from a client, the merest hint of deviation from Roark’s Holy Writ, and the building will never be erected. This pattern repeats, ad nauseam, throughout the novel.

Contrasting Roark is Peter Keating, a spineless man, worthless as an architect, but well versed in the socializing necessary to acquire commissions. Keating makes a career not out of designing his own buildings and fulfilling his own commissions, but by passing off the work of other architects, frequently Roark, as his own. 

This dichotomy, between Roark’s perfection, and Keating’s ineptitude forms the spectrum along which every actor in the novel must fall. Any individual who brings about their own exclusion from society by an unswerving adherence to their own thought without consideration of others is all-good, regardless of their actions. Any individual who gives the slightest concern about social activity is spineless and worthless. One exception to this rule is made in the case of Ellsworth Toohey, the only character in the novel of any real depth.

Ellsworth seeks control over the whole world, to relegate all human desires to the simplistic need to satisfy the desires of one’s fellow man. Altruism, even as Ellsworth preaches it, is evil. It is simply the means of gaining control over other people through the application of emotional, if not physical force. This negative socialism does not strike me as the kind of knee-jerk, interpretation one might form after a negative experience with modernist literature.

One last negative element I want to discuss. Rand takes a very negative stance on Modernist literature, at one point somewhat indirectly singling out Joyce’s Ulysses as a particular example of Ellsworth and company’s villainous aims in literature, “When the fact that one is a total nonentity who’s done nothing more outstanding than eating, sleeping and chatting with neighbors becomes a fact worthy of pride, of announcement to the world and of diligent study by millions of readers-the fact that one has built a cathedral becomes unrecordable and unannouncable.” Yet, in its structure, The Fountainhead is rather modernist itself. Roark faces and overcomes trials as an architect, struggling to build according to his vision without concern for the desires of his clients. By the end of the novel however, he has had no arc in the slightest. At the opening of the book, Roark is an outsider to society, vindicated in his self-righteousness, determined to do his own thing. And by the end of the novel, he is exactly the same, an outsider, uncompromising and self-righteous. Rand’s dislike of modernist literature is somewhat contradictory and highlighted by her own portrayal of the literature.

I will give Rand some credit, however. I was able to overlook the simple characters and bland plot for the first two-thirds of the book, because her writing was marvelously edited. On the small scale, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, Rand’s prose is phenomenal. Thoughts flowed into each other smoothly, and I didn’t want to put the book down. Watching Roark and Keating establish themselves in the architectural community was riveting. After they were established in their ways, Rand began to focus on Ellsworth’s conspiratorial degradation of the human race to the point of losing focus on the strengths her story possessed. 

From the perspective of setting construction, she succeeded again, New York felt lived in and developed, even with only small chunks of the city discussed in any great detail. I believed the city, I could see and understand the buildings, even with a minimal amount of explicit description. The sleek, minimalist lines of Roark’s designs leapt from the page and into my imagination. In the end, these strengths were not enough to overcome the dreadful storytelling which persisted throughout the rest of the text.

Would I recommend The Fountainhead?

Absolutely not. If you are 17, then this book will confirm everything you believe about yourself in opposition to your parents and all other authority figures. Any older, and you will recognize it for the thin, weakly argued, poorly structured mess it is.

Score: 1.9/5

Would I keep this on my bookshelf? No.

-Mr. Cheddar