#one day I'll read rand because I'm curious as to what the fuss (positive/derogatory) is about

[mervynbunter]

Various, extremely disjointed excerpts from Henry Oliver and Hollis Robbins’s literary discussion on Atlas Shrugged (and a little on The Fountainhead):

OLIVER: It’s all about infrastructure, energy, people doing exploitation in the name of the common good, ineffective political leaders, people covering up lies and misdemeanours, people being accepting of what is obviously criminal behaviour because it’s in the cause of the greater good. We have free speech, all these topics, energy production. We’re seeing this in the headlines. When I was reading this book, I was like, “Oh my God, how did she know?”

ROBBINS: [T]he opposition from Rand is as strong on the religious right as it is on the left. In fact, very strong. When Atlas Shrugged came out, William F. Buckley famously had Whittaker Chambers write the review. He hated her. He despised her. He despised the fact that she put reason first.

ROBBINS: [Dagny’s] aesthetic is very classical, draped. She doesn’t wear flowery patterns. She wears draped, clearly close-fitting gowns and grey tailored suits and a minimum of jewellery, though she does have this bracelet chain made of Rearden metal. You don’t know when she possibly has time to go shopping, but she’s perfectly dressed all the time in the fashion that we would understand as feminist. She wears trousers, she wears suits, but when she goes out, this black velvet cape. I think it’s important to see her as that, even though nobody talks about that in terms of this novel, what a heroine she is. I know that when I was reading her as a teenage girl, that’s it.

ROBBINS: I want to see if you want to compare her to Dorothea or just to any other Victorian women novel that you can think of. That’s the closest, right? Is there anybody that’s closest to Dorothea from Middlemarch? Is that there are these set pieces. People think that Rand—the idea is that she’s not a great writer. She is a great writer. She started in Hollywood. Her first book, The Fountainhead, was made into a movie. She understands plotting and keeping the reader’s attention. We go forward, we go backwards.

OLIVER: It’s not a novel of ideas as such, it’s a melodrama of ideas. I think one thing that people who think she’s a bad writer will say is it’s melodrama, the characters are flat, the prose is not lyrical, all these different things. Whereas when I read it, I was like, “She’s so good at melodrama.” I feel like, in some ways, it does not feel like a 1950s novel because there’s so much excitement about technology, so much feminism, just so many things that I do not associate [with the 1950s]. [...] I often would read pages and think, “This [dialogue] would actually be really good in, not an A++ movie, but in a decent crime movie or something. This would be quite good dialogue.” There’s a comic book aesthetic to it in the way that the scenes play out. Just a lot of these ’50s aesthetics actually are present in the book.

OLIVER: She wants you to be very clear when you leave that this book is not a creed in the name of “just make money and have free market capitalism so you can be rich”. That paragraph and so many others, it’s almost biblical in the way she writes it. She’s really hammering the rhythms, and the tones, and the parallels. She’s also, I think, trying to appropriate some of the way the Bible talks about money and turn it into her own secular pseudo-Aristotelian idea, right? [...] We talk a lot these days about, how can I be my best self? That’s what Rand is saying. She’s saying, actually, it’s not about earning money, it’s not about being rich. It is about the perfection of the moral life. It’s about the pursuit of excellence. It’s about the cultivation of virtue. These are the important things. This is what Dagny is doing.

OLIVER: This was the moment when I was like, “I’ve had this lurking feeling about how Russian this novel is.” At this point, I was like, “That could be a short story by Gogol,” right? The way she set that up. That is very often the trap that a Gogol character or maybe a Dostoevsky character finds themselves in, right? That you suddenly see that the world is against you. Maybe you’re crazy and paranoid. Maybe you’re not. Depends which story we’re reading. You run around trying to get out and you realise, “Oh, my God, I’m more trapped than I thought. Actually, maybe there is no way out.” Cherryl does not get a lot of pages. She is, as you say, quite a minor character, but she illustrates the whole story so, so well, so dramatically.

OLIVER: I think sometimes the Galt stuff is held up as what’s wrong with this novel. When you abstract it and just say it, maybe that’s an easier case to make. I think once you understand that this is 1957, she’s been writing the book for what, twelve years, I think, or fifteen years; the Galt speech takes her three years to write, I think. This is, I think—the most important label we can give the novel is it’s a Cold War novel. She’s Russian. What she’s doing, in some ways, is saying to America, “This is what will happen to us if we adopt the system of our Cold War enemies.” It’s like, “This is Animal Farm, but in America with real people with trains and energy plants and industry, no pigs. This is real life.” We’ve had books like that in our own time.

OLIVER: My overall feeling is I’m really glad I read it. It’s much less crazy than the actual Randians I have met in the world. It’s not the book I was told it was. If you’re interested, you should read it. I have a very catholic approach to what we should read. I’m not going to say, “She’s got scary, nasty ideas, I won’t read it.” There are boring bits. Let’s just be honest, there are boring bits. It’s too long. That is true of a lot of novels.

ROBBINS: Yes, it’s a sci-fi novel. She takes pains to understand the radio waves and how it is that Galt is able to do certain things that it’s not too sci-fi, it’s believable enough. The other thing is I hadn’t spent enough time on the end and the fact that the world is going to hell. When you look at the 1960s disaster novels, even such as like Planet of the Apes, you could imagine Atlas Shrugged being a prequel.