The Fountainhead

I haven’t done a book review in a long time, because of academics preventing me from reading. I did pick up this book at the Princeton Public Library one rainy day and opened it out of curiosity. Even though I had heard of Ayn Rand and her popularity and thus had expectations, she did not disappoint.

Rand’s voice is nuanced, knowledgeable and just. She skillfully presents the ideals embodied in her characters as emotions and motives. Each of her characters is exaggerated to represent a state of being, a specific extreme identity. Howard Roark is the stark idealist who cannot care about social acceptability. Peter Keating is his polar opposite, the magnet of approval, of popularity, accommodating, handsome and ambitious. Intermingled between them are support characters so detailed they could be the protagonists in someone else’s novel. I have no particular interest in architecture, but this is a spellbinding piece of literature regardless.

The intangibles definitely seal the deal. Throughout the lengthy chapters, not once did I lose the intense sense of humanity, of vitality, of realism that the novel embodied. The people were as of flesh and bone, and their adventures could have occurred to me tomorrow. Ayn Rand truly brings alive the moral ideals that she pits against each other. It is this deeply psychological, human intangible that makes this novel a classic. I am eager to read Atlas Shrugged.

There is a contest for high schoolers if you find this book as amazing as I did.
http://aynrandnovels.com/essay-contests.html