Complex Numbers

Shrug It Off

I do like a good literary takedown... though only when I agree with the person doing the takedowning. This one's from LitHub.

    Read a 1957 review of Ayn Rand’s “excruciatingly awful” Atlas Shrugged.  

The article is from last October 10, which is important to note because it starts out:

Today is the sixty-sixth publication anniversary of Ayn Rand’s 1100-page magnum opus of unreadable doggerel libertarian science fiction, Atlas Shrugged.

Using strikethrough style is, of course, a cheap trick, one where the writer is coyly covering their mouths, giggling, and going "Oops, did I say that out loud?" And it makes me laugh almost every time. Yes, even when I do it. Especially when I do it. In this case, though, the article author did it; I just reproduced it here.

Still, calling AS "unreadable," even in strikethrough, is a bit unfair. It is, by some definition of the phrase, readable, in that it contains words, and those words are (as I recall) spelled correctly and ordered according to English grammatical practice into sentences and paragraphs.

Set in a dystopian United States in which private businesses suffer under increasingly burdensome laws and regulations (isn’t it always the way), it’s the story of railroad executive Dagny Taggart and her lover, steel magnate Hank Rearden, and their struggle against the “looters” who want to exploit their productivity.

Hence the "fiction" part. Here in reality, it is the "captains of industry" who loot the labor of the workers and exploit their productivity.

Despite receiving largely negative reviews upon its release, the novel sold briskly and became a formative text for numerous conservative/libertarian ghouls politicians and thinkers...

That's the trouble with science fiction, good or bad: there's always someone out there trying to make it happen. Sometimes, that's a good thing. Sometimes, it's not.

One prominent conservative critic of Rand and her philosophy was William F. Buckley Jr., whose National Review published this scathing review of the novel by (Communist spy turned HUAC whistleblower turned book critic) Whittaker Chambers in December of ’57.

So, the rest of the article is Chambers' original review, from which I'll quote only sparingly.

It is the more persuasive, in some quarters, because the author deals wholly in the blackest blacks and the whitest whites.

People being unable to handle nuance is hardly a new thing.

So the Children of Light win handily by declaring a general strike of brains, of which they have a monopoly, letting the world go, literally, to smash. In the end, they troop out of their Rocky Mountain hideaway to repossess the ruins.

Here in reality, those who we today lump into "billionaires" wouldn't last a week in the Gulch, not without the near-slave labor that cooks for and cleans up after them.

It is then, in the book’s last line, that a character...

Look, I don't care how terrible the book is, or how spot-on the review otherwise is; spoiling the last line is cheating.

But the words keep shouting us down. In the end that tone dominates. But it should be its own antidote, warning us that anything it shouts is best taken with the usual reservations with which we might sip a patent medicine. Some may like the flavor. In any case, the brew is probably without lasting ill effects.

And here the review falls apart, for here we are, two-thirds of a century later, and some people still treat that book like it was handed down from Mt. Sinai.