Total Page : 72
Publisher : SparkNotes
Publication Date : 2002 07 15
>> An Important and Thoroughly Enjoyable Novel
The Fountainhead is one of the best books I ve ever read
I was intimidated by this book By the size by what I ve heard about the author and by a lot of the reviews While philosophy does interest me my fascination with stories is usually character development and dialogue two things that some of the reviewers picked out as lacking in The Fountainhead
They re wrong
Howard Roark is a symbol for Ayn Rand s Objectivism sure He s made out to be the ideal man But he wouldn t work as the ideal to which others should strive and on a larger scale the novel itself wouldn t work if Roark wasn t believable as a human And he is His friendships are real and passionate His triumphs and victories become ours There are a few one dimensional characters in the book such as Toohey s followers but that s not an issue with me because there are some one dimensional people out there as well All of the main characters are beautifully and in some cases painfully real
And the dialogue Not at all stilted Some lines made me laugh out loud Some made me er do the other thing where your eyes get wet and you have to pretend you re allergic to some stuff and then excuse yourself and then run to your room and bawl your eyes out
The novel is that captivating It s heartbreaking It inspired me to no end It s a beautiful epic of human triumph that celebrates intelligence integrity and living life the way it should be lived for the love of life itself for the love of yourself and being satisfied and uplifted by the fact that you re human
An utterly fantastic and important book Read this
10/10
>> Trippiest book that I ve ever read some spoilers
It s simultaneously subtle and obvious The first clew comes when the protagonist Howard Roark is booted out of architecture school for having ideas that are too original although all his professors admit that his ideas are quite brilliant
Wait a minute the reader thinks that s not realistic Professors in the liberal arts are desperate for students with original thoughts practically begging them not to echo back the same tired ideas that they hear year after year after year
Finally it hits the reader realises that this is EXACTLY the description that persons of certain personality types would say if they had failed out of school especially if they had a few good ideas that their professors liked but kept interrupting class repeating them as a mantra and furthermore refusing to study any of the material that they are actually meant to be learning which the narrator practically confesses to the main character doing Perhaps there is some merit to Roark s ideas but that doesn t mean he should lack a background in neo classical or any other style of architecture and personally I despise the style he s clearly promoting which is seen readily in all those horrible spiritless poured concrete buildings that Americans were erecting in the 1960s
So here is the secret to understanding this book It s written entirely in a sort of third person unreliable narrator The character of the narrator is Howard Roark and the Howard Roark described is a sort of trippy idealised version of himself Think of it as a sort of grotesque caricature of the conservative economic and social ideals emerging in the US at the time of the writing where we learn about what the narrator holds dear and his distorted picture of the world through the distorted retelling of the events that befell him It s the goal of the reader to read between the lines and try to figure out what actually happened that the narrator is reinventing to cast himself as the hero imagine Theodore Bulpington of H G Wells The Bulpington of Blup For example it s cleverly glossed over that Roark is practising architecture without a license or passing any of the various certification exams required to show fitness in producing habitable buildings but instead foils some backwater rube into allowing him to design a revolutionary gas station or something which probably by blind luck doesn t collapse or burst into flames As the story continues and forgive me if I get details wrong it s been two years since I read this book he starts submitting plans for some housing development to an old schoolmate Peter Keating possibly unsolicited who he describes as being rather devoid of creativity and originality The buildings turn out looking quite different from how Roark designed them and at some point he s challenging the allegedly spineless Keating possibly reinventing himself stalking Keating noticing some resemblance between a project Keating is working on and some schizophrenic scrawl he had posted to Keating s office unsolicited and instead of just removing his name from a project that he was never officially connected with blows the things up He s captured makes some ridiculous but obviously quite meaningful to both Roark the narrator and Roark the reinvention of the narrator s self rant about the value of ego and is heroically set free It s pretty safe to guess at this point that this is what the narrator wished had happened but that he is probably writing his life story from behind bars
Other character emerge as the story progresses including Ellsworth Toohey an incarnation of the conservative view of the progressive movement and Dominique Francon a terribly board rich girl who gets her kicks breaking things picking out random quarry workers in this case Roark imagining them as the men of her dreams getting herself raped and falling in love with them even more
There are other characters all strangely on the same page with their thoughts and one could do quite a sophisticated analysis of how these characters reflect an emerging conservative world view at the time or writing and parody them to illustrate it s fundamental absurdity Amazon reviews however aren t the place and I haven t the time nor the desire but if you want to read a rather chilling tale told from the point of view of a psychopathic rapist/terrorist and is at the same time a parody of the ultra right wing movement then I strongly recommend Fountainhead This is a book that will stay with you for a long time
>> Why are her novels so dreadfully boring
I m sorry but Rand s novels are just plain boring I ve read three of them and all three of them have bored me toward near death experiences She seems to hold up creative people as some kind of heroes but the problem I see is that highly creative people never behave the way she portrays them Her characters are always so stilted so two dimensional so much like cardboard cutouts of what real heroic people are like She seems to be marketing some ideal about running a world without emotions as though rational thinking sets atop some kind of rock solid pedestal that is completely separate from and immune from our emotional lives It s not the way our brains are wired and it s certainly not the way the minds of creative people work Creative work involves tons of intuition which is closely linked to our emotional inner world From what I can tell Rand experienced little or none of the intuition necessary for creative life She seems to dream of a world operated by some big mathematical computer program that she and she alone wrote over and over and over into all of her novels
