I know that Ayn Rand has been done to death throughout the Lavender Room forum, but I just thought I would do my review of The Fountainhead based on the 500 pages that I have gotten through it and decided that I have wasted enough of my life with this stuffy saga.
I just don’t think this almost 700-page pile of pretentious, phony-baloney, stuffy, philosophical nonsensical drivel is worth the time. I just don’t “get” it. All I really got from it was that it focused on an architect named Howard Roark who just really needs to sell out and just do his job, and quit turning down work because it somehow didn’t conform to his own stuffy, self-righteous philosophical beliefs. Note to Howard Roar: You are just an architect! Not to put down the profession, but my God!! It’s just a job!! He eventually gets into a heavy affair with this elitist, scatter-brained, snobby “socialite” newspaper columnist named Dominique Francon who thinks that she’s above everyone intellectually, and therefore she is the only one on the face of the earth who can appreciate this Howard fellow. This silly woman has married two guys (both of whom she despised at the times) consecutively for some lame-brained, philosophical nonsense reasons that I am just too much of a common, unenlightened man to really grasp. And don’t even get me started on the ridiculous dialogue, which sounds hideously unnatural. The characters just seemed like hollow shells that spew out some contrived monologues that are meant as vehicles for Ayn Rand’s meaningless Objectivist philosophy. I mean, would you ever want to be friends with any of the characters? Or do business with them? Or even just go out for a beer with them? Didn’t think so.
I liked the beginning where Roark was diving off the cliff into a lake at the rock quarry… after quitting school… and getting ready to go off on his own.
Actually I liked the whole book quite a lot… the theme of a guy who never compromised his principals in spite of numerous setbacks and obsticals, was timely for me in my mid-twenties.
Also, it wasn’t “just a job”… he was an artist… producing art that few people understood or liked. So should an artist produce works that are commercially viable so he can make money? As I recall, he prefered to do practical jobs like working in a quarry, rather than compromise his art.
I’d say it has mostly been Dominique who has turned me off so much to this book. Her, and Ellsworth Toohey. I wish they would both just shut up and go away. Howard seems a reasonably decent chap, not nearly annoying as the aforementioned ones, but just needs to turn down the dial way down on his idealism. He’s better off not being in a relationship of any kind (especially with Dominique).
I liked both, but atlas shrugged would have been better without the 30 page rants (speeches). It became a bit too repetitive. If some of that was stripped out, it would have been much like Fountainhead, which I enjoyed more, for that sole reason.
