Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand's 1957 magnum opus. Over 1100 pages of railroads, bureaucratic wrangling, and tedious philosophical debates. This book wasted 10 days of my life in late December 2023, and I'm making it everyone else's problem.
Before I begin, I want to make it clear that I went into the book wanting to like it, if only because most people hate it. The edition that I had had a magnificent Art Deco cover, extra notes from Leonard Peikoff, and an insert you could cut out and mail to New York for more information about Objectivism. I wasn't even considering writing this review, no one had told me to read it, everything was very low-pressure, the ideal setup for a book that wants to win a positive impression.
Unfortunately, it failed, utterly and miserably. Atlas Shrugged makes the fatal mistake of trying to be a thrilling novel, philosophical manifesto, and parable all at the same time, and fails at all three as a result. The plot sucks, the characters are flat and boring, the philosophical arguments are incoherent, and the overarching lesson is muddled by everything else that happens in the plot. I'd say better luck next time, but after reading The Fountainhead afterwards, it was probably for the best that she switched to non-fiction.
Atlas Shrugged has some of the worst worldbuilding I've ever seen, and that's including the college AU fanfiction that I read in middle school. It's set in what is supposed to be America, since it's called the United States and all the states referenced are real, but the President has been replaced by the "Head of State", Congress has been replaced by a "National Legislature" (with no comments on the structure, so who knows if it's still bicameral), and the Supreme Court is never mentioned at all. There are no political lines (the Democratic and Republican parties are never mentioned; in fact, no parties are ever mentioned). The Army and Navy are referenced, but not the Coast Guard, Air Force, or Marines. The rest of the world is mentioned, and appears to be entirely Communist (even England, which would ostensibly being run by Churchill, but who knows).
The time period is a bit indistinct: the technology goes up to the 1950s, but only bits and pieces; there are long-haul plane flights and the diesel locomotives seem post-war, but no jets. I ballpark it as mid-1940s, as an average. World War II is never mentioned, though, or World War I, or the Great Depression.
Presumably, all this serves to create a kind of Strangereal-esque world so that the plot gets a veil to hide behind if anyone points out how different it is from the real world. Unfortunately, it chokes on this veil after it gets whipped down the story's throat by a gust of wind coming through the massive plot holes. My biggest one was that, given the level of intelligence and competence on display by the society at large, the world as it is couldn't have been built by its inhabitants! Either nerve gas got into all the air ducts, or everyone started shaking lead onto their food instead of salt 5 to 10 years before the plot started.[1]
The country's inability to recover from this is attributed to the fact that intelligent strivers are not able to rise to positions of power and influence, even though all of the "good guys" have done exactly that. Also, the supposed dearth of intelligent and competent people established in the first half of the book is contradicted by the second half, in which all of America's competent-but-low-status workers start bringing what's left of the edifice of civilization down by refusing to rise through the ranks. Of course, we never see any of these workers; every non-Chosen appears to be corrupt or a p-zombie. I think this is Rand trying to have her cake and eat it; if you're just skimming, then you'll probably take all of this in stride and not notice.
So, the world is a complete mess, and this is the foundation upon which she is going to build her plot. Great.
All the characters are flat and/or stereotypes. The protagonist, Dagny, and her allies are hyper-competent, hyper-intelligent masters-of-all-trades whose only flaw is that they care too much about doing their jobs well; they make incredible off-the-cuff speeches that reduce their interlocutors sweating piles of jelly. The villains are either cartoonishly incompetent[2] or purely self-interested[3]. So, instead of just repeating the above line for every single character, I'm going to go down the list of "good guys" and decide whether or not they deserve their wealth (for, as all capitalists know, you don't deserve anything you didn't earn, and you didn't earn anything you inherited).
There is one "good guy" who has a slightly more complex character: Eddie Willers, Dagny Taggart's assistant. Unfortunately, the source of his complexity is that he's less competent than the other characters (90th percentile instead of 99th, perhaps). His family have been serving the Taggarts for at least 3 generations, and he dies on the job at the end of the book after Dagny abandons him to go on strike[4].
The synopsis is here. I'm not going to rehash it, just going over my thoughts.
The fact that it wasn't a class war was nice; the characters are rich, yes, but they'd still be striking if they weren't. The main conflict is between the proto-professional-managerial class and the billionaires; the proletariat aren't a major force until the latter half of the book (though the first person we see that has "gone Galt" is the brakeman on the Taggart Comet, a prole.)
There's a hint of a wordcel vs shape-rotator conflict, since all of the villains are slick talkers without STEM skills (I don't count Stadler, since all he really wanted was to be left alone; the "if you're not with us, you're against us" attitude is a leftist one, and I refuse to duplicate it here, even if Rand believed it), where all of the heroes are engineers along with whatever else it is they do.
Still, all this won't save the plot from its biggest issue: Rand tries to create a dystopia and all the events that go with it, but can't resist giving them what she believes they deserve (i.e., wealth beyond measure). Her inability to avoid her personal biases (presumably because this book is just all of her brainworms poured onto a page) also results in her missing a few major points: the law that would outlaw monopolies is presented as wholly bad, even though monopolies can and do loot just as much as Communists (cf. robber barons, the corporate raiders of the 1980s, etc.), there isn't any violence anywhere, except by Ragnar and Cuffy Meigs (even though in a depression as bad as the book depicts people would be clawing each others' eyes out for an old slice of ham). Furthermore, Rand has Dagny and Rearden sneer at people who don't want a billboard in the middle of the wilderness (Rand was a pure city dweller; while I like my neon and rain on concrete, I also love the mountains and prairie, and forgoing one for the other makes them both worse; she would not have understood this), and Dagny appears to be unable to comprehend the effects of a depression on the creation and purchase of material goods.
Galt's Gulch is crap, too. Like any commune, it runs swimmingly for the first couple dozen people, before the population hits Dunbar's number and people start defecting.
If it were up to me to rewrite Atlas Shrugged, I'd keep the focus on a couple of competent guys in large companies getting stymied by the bureaucracy. They meet in a bar or somesuch place, cook up a plan to use their complementary skillsets to go into business, quiet quit to work on it ("going Galt", but more pragmatic), and end with their company launching to massive success.
As I previously stated, Atlas Shrugged tries to be a novel, a manifesto, and a parable. I've just spend the past 1600 words discussing why it sucks as a novel, so let's turn our attention to the other two.
A manifesto needs to be short, succinct, and clear. Unfortunately, for reasons I will discuss later, Objectivism can't really be short and succinct. Meanwhile, the structure and requirements of a novel mean that it can't be very clear, either; the closest we get is John Galt's massive speech, which contains so many arguments that I can neither enumerate nor refute them all here; however, ~60% of them are fallacious, and the other 40% have now been tried and found wanting.
A parable also needs to be short, succinct, and clear. Atlas Shrugged gets a bit closer to success here than it does to the manifesto, but still falls short due to its complexity. The Good Samaritan would only have been hurt by a middle chapter where the Samaritan falls in love with the innkeeper's wife and they have an affair, but this is exactly what Atlas Shrugged does[5]. It needs serious compression to be a parable, but that'd kill the "novel" bit.
The writing flows like barbed wire through a urethra. It took me 10 days to get through it, and the notes I took down didn't take that long; for context, I read Oathbringer in about 5 days, and A Clash of Kings in about 2. I'm not exactly sure how to describe it, but the prose is janky, and reading it feels like riding in a stick-shift with someone who keeps missing gears.
Objectivism starts off several million points in the hole due to redefining a word that already has a well-understood meaning ("selfishness"), and only gets worse from there. The end result is either utilitarianism with a thumb on the scale for self-utils, or possibly a branch of Epicureanism. Nothing special and nothing interesting. Her metaphysics is entirely based around the idea that things exist in a manner independent of their perception (which Plato worked out a couple thousand years ago). Her idea of "reason" sounds nice (no emotions, no authoritarianism, no faith), until you hit the issue of what axioms to take. The whole thing falls down a hole when you realize that it reduces to "everyone needs to be exceptional", which is categorically impossible.
[1]: A friend commented that this could be an accurate reflection of what Rand thought happened to the U.S. after Coolidge left office.
[2]: I say this, anyway, but a few days after I finished the book, Nature released their degrowth article, so maybe they weren't as unrealistic as I thought.
[3]: The manner in which their "bad" self-interest differs from Objectivism's "good" self-interest is left as an exercise for the reader.
[4]: Presumably the message here is "suck shit and die, plebs! If you ain't first, you're last!" Even if it isn't, it's still not a very good look for Rand; Eddie devotes his life to the Taggarts, and all he gets is the privilege to clean up Dagny's mess once she leaves. She bangs Rearden too, rather than him; surely ol' Eddie earned at least a pegging!
[5]: I suspect that Rand had great difficulty killing her darlings, since she tries to insert a Fountainhead-esque goonfic alongside her philosophical musings with the romance arcs in Atlas Shrugged (Dagny Taggart is one "Y/N" away from a reverse harem situation).