Slogging through Atlas Shrugged

After months of slogging through it, I'm now closing in on the 800-page mark of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. The end is still not in sight, but I've read enough to jump to some conclusions:

1. She could have said it in a lot fewer pages; the message is really quite simple. But then, our lives could probably be said in a lot fewer pages too. It takes a tome of time to realize a simple message.

2. But Ayn Rand is no Dostoevsky, although both wrote tomes. In a Dostoevsky tome, the world is in living color. Atlas Shrugged is in black and white.

A Dostoevsky novel paints people and situations in all the ambiguous shades of real life. But the world of Atlas Shrugged is Either/Or, which happens to be the title of Part II.

Part III is entitled "A is A". Oh brother...

So there is a minimalist stage-set texture to each Ayn Rand scene. Everything -- furniture, factories, cities, nature itself -- everything is a prop in a backdrop for a small cast of characters who are truly human. But because everything else is prop, these human heroes don't live convincingly in the real world.

As a matter of fact, by about page 700, they have all secluded themselves in a valley in Colorado (of all places) mutually admiring one another. A kind of Peace-able Kingdom of Snoots. Oh the joy of being far away from the Great Unwashed!

3. Ayn Rand obviously never heard that old adage: any church is perfect until you join it. She would have us believe there is a perfect church, albeit a very exclusive one. And because the Church of Ayn Rand is so exclusive, in Atlas Shrugged, she manages to get you to dislike her main characters long before she gets you to dislike everybody else too. Atlas Shrugged is an unlovely book.

4. It is unlovely because there are no transformations of character as the hundreds of pages slog on and on. Each character simply becomes the values he or she represents extrapolated to a logical extreme. But because nobody changes, hope is not part of the calculus.

Logos2Go

1 Corinthians 6.10-11... nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. And that is what some of you were. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.