Sigh. Too little, too late.

I predict an onslaught of really awful prose: “Watching him transfer large amounts of capital among different projects as the market identified the most efficient use of resources, her breasts heaved in tremulous excitement…”

Oy – John nailed it! But it’s prose with MEANING! Yeah, it was a bit ham-handed, but I’ll take mediocre writing with ideological purity, over great writing of dubious ideology, anyday.

Actually I’m a fan of great writing and try not to make ideological tests part of my judgments of artistic merit… but nobody reads Rand because they love great fiction, of course. (I admit my bias: I live fiction that illustrates the contradictions of being human, not fiction that tries to erase those contradictions.)

“Ideological purity” is the key idea, though; her books really are stylistically closest to those of starry-eyes young Soviets writing novels about the inevitable revolutionary paradise and the horrors of capitalism (which were, of course, part of the context in which she wrote them).

A friend of mine complained about her writing after reading Atlas Shrugged by saying, “I couldn’t underline what was important, because everything was important.” She had a way of making sure every single word she wrote was making some sort of point. My friend was right, if you wanted to underline the parts of the book that were philosophically relevant, you’d wind up underlining the whole book. Quite a remarkable feat to write a book like that…