The continuing popularity of Ayn Rand, especially her ability to draw even the irregular reader to her oeuvre of inelegant, often repugnant prose, is mystifying. It is even more perplexing when gurus of industry, their air-kissing wives and girlfriends, and other celebrities speak of how The Fountainhead changed their lives, was a guiding force in their success, a motivational mantra, a fixture on their bedside table. Such frightening effusions of praise! Imagine having to wake up every morning to that ghastly Signet cover of a robotic man aiming a ball of fire emanating sword-like shafts of light at a wasteland of symmetrical, towering construction. It wouldn’t brighten my day.

I spent last weekend poring over the book, trying to understand what prompts the fervour with which it has been received since 1943. There is this to say about Ayn Rand: her unrelenting defence of the indefensible has a peculiar, albeit perverse, allure. Her ethic of selfishness, embodied in her egoistic hero, the architect-genius Howard Roark, is dangerously flawed. Roark, despite his unshakeable refusal to compromise and his defence of individual freedom (the basis of Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism) comes across as a bit of a prick. An unattractive, unsociable prick, with no concept of rational entrepreneurship and a stolid, quite juvenile, refusal to market his skills and services. “I don’t intend to build in order to serve or help anyone,” he declares, “I don’t intend to build in order to have clients. I intend to have clients in order to build.” This is silly, and contradictory logic for someone as much in support of “uncontrolled, laissez-faire capitalism” as Rand was. Roark’s deliberate unconcern for the customer just comes through as lazy economics. His dedication and love of his work is as admirable as his refusal to give his talent visibility is anal-retentive.

The heroine, Dominique, is the figment of a fanciful, chauvinistic imagination. Her cold aloofness and open distaste for the men who admire her, coupled with her masochistic propensity for hero-worship to the point of desiring a master-slave relationship with her lover, make her a far more outrageous character than Roark. Despite her trenchant individualism, Dominique is reduced to the helplessness of the heroines of assembly-line romance. What tells her apart from them has little appeal beyond shock value: she enjoys rape and marries too often.

The sex scenes are orgies of violence. Rand does not intend her readers to feel sorry for either Dominique or Roark, and one doesn’t. One just grits one’s teeth through the constant humiliation longed for by the first, and the incorrigible fat-headedness of the second. The other characters are puppets with the sole purpose of giving voice to Rand’s philosophy. The writing is monotonous, endlessly proselytizing. The book could have been half its size.

I have reconciled myself to the fact that The Fountainhead will never go out of print. I confess failure to grasp its literary merit, but it takes nothing away from my admiration of an author who has successfully convinced generations of readers that heroism lies in unmitigated obstinacy and a total disregard for any society save one’s own. Rand, extreme idealist and icon of arrogance, shocks into submission.