I’ve been told by numerous people to not read anything by Ayn Rand. While she does have some devoted fans, the consensus I’ve basically heard over the years is that her philosophy is insane, and so that reading her is not only a waste of time, but also potentially damaging to read because you might end up mistakenly thinking that her ideas are “smart.” However, I’ve never been one to run from different ideas and worldviews, and so I was actually curious to see what all of the fuss was about. I don’t need to have everything I read conform to my own beliefs. In fact, on the contrary, I like to consume things that are different from what I think because then it helps me challenge my beliefs and reach a more informed conclusion on why I view the world the way I do. So, I figured I’d give an Ayn Rand book a try. It seems like her most famous book is Atlas Shrugged, but I was more drawn to The Fountainhead because it seemed shorter, more accessible, and just a more interesting read.

This is one of those books that has a plot that’s difficult to describe, because it’s one of those “this story shows the life of its character” kind of stories. It’s not showing one adventure of the character, or even one period of his life. Rather, the book takes place over the course of about 20 years, and so we see the path that the protagonist Howard Roark goes down in that timeframe. Howard is an aspiring architect, and he’s the archetype of what Ayn Rand seems to consider to be “the perfect man.” He fully embodies her philosophy of objectivism, only chasing down his own dreams and self-interests, and rejecting anything that gets in the way of that. We see this in Howard’s work ethic and personal standards, as he holds his ideals as more important than anything else. In his pursuit to being an architect, he does things like outright turn down clients that want their house designed in a way that he doesn’t deem to be right. He doesn’t care about the money or the prestige, but instead just wants to build marvelous structures.

That isn’t much of a plot description to go off of, but there are just so many things that happen along the way that it makes it hard to talk about much more than that. We meet so many different characters along the way that take the spotlight at different points in the novel that it’s hard for me to just give a general description of what’s going on in the book. But essentially what it all boils down to is one man’s pursuit to achieving his ideals.

It’s easy to see how Ayn Rand has embedded her brand of philosophy into the book, with characters frequently indulging lengthy monologues about how they view the world, which often match up with Rand’s feelings. Much like most people that subscribe to one single extreme narrative on how the world works, I find Rand’s philosophy to be flawed, but not ultimately useless by any means. There are merits to her philosophy of objectivism that we can all learn from, but going into it as extremely as she does also presents its pitfalls. My ultimate point here is that while I definitely don’t agree with a lot of this brand of philosophy, I did find some interesting takeaways, and so I also don’t think it’s useless to just dismiss something like this entirely like so many people will encourage you to do. There are multiple ways of looking at the world, and the truth is always somewhere in the middle of all of them. I think that there are areas of The Fountainhead that can easily be criticized for being too extreme, but there are also some things that are worth reading here.

So, that’s my feelings on the philosophy of the book, but what about its story and characters? Honestly, I’ve read plenty of old classics that I thought were hard to get through, but The Fountainhead was surprisingly accessible to me. It does have moments where it heavily leans into its subject of architecture, which I find to be mostly uninteresting, but the character arcs are what make the plot interesting in the end. There are some characters I didn’t like, such as Ellsworth Toohey, but most of them are pretty interesting. Its big strength does lie in main character Howard Roark, who is just such a fascinating character. He can be a bit of an enigma, but that’s what makes his story so engaging. Also, the interactions that he has with the other characters are what makes the story so compelling. Seeing him interact with a character like Peter Keating, who is in the architecture business for the complete opposite reasons as Roark, puts an interesting twist on things. The best relationship of the book is between Howard Roark and Dominique Francon though, but talking about it too much can ruin the fun of it.

It took me a while to get through, coming in at over 700 pages, but in the end I really enjoyed my time with The Fountainhead, certainly more than I thought I would. I like books like this that make me think, and while I definitely didn’t leave the book subscribing to Ayn Rand’s beliefs, I thought that the ideas she presents are at least interesting to read about. Like I said, there are many people that will advise you to never go near Ayn Rand because they despise her so much, but I advise you to read a book that might challenge the way that you view the world. It’s important to read something like this critically without blindly following the philosophy presented, but it isn’t a crime to check it out. I don’t know how some of Rand’s other works stack up, but I thought The Fountainhead was a pretty good read.

4/5