A contemporary novel.Ī flabby, fervid melodrama of a high-strung Southern family from Conroy ( The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline), whose penchant for overwriting once again obscures a genuine talent. Unfortunately, she falls for the lure of the soapbox, unnecessarily, as her story would have done the trick for her. Others get hurt, too, and Ayn Rand makes full use of a chance to blast the forces of conservatism, of reaction, of compromise. Jealousies and hates and resentments cannot touch him, for architecture is his god and the little spiteful people who thrust at him get punished in the rebound. A stormy romance crashes across his path, fraught with danger and passion and disillusionment and triumph. She has told this time the story of an idealistic young architect, who refused to compromise with popular taste or accepted practice, who starved in the process, but who finally won through to success, as the foremost modernist of his time. Ayn Rand showed in the Living (Macmillan, 1936) an ability to handle groups of people and shifting impacts convincingly, with implicit drama. In spite of this excess of verbiage, the novel is a telling one - and original. The story would have been faster paced, the characters more sharply limned, had whole episodes, repetitive and tautological, been eliminated had long speeches been cut to hare bones.

It falls short, as do so many modern novels, in the apparent inability of the author (or editor) to be a ruthless surgeon.

Ayn rand the fountainhead book