Book review: Ideal by Ayn Rand - a tedious, crude and artless exposition
Rand's unpublished novella is a perfect example of her unsubtle and cultish worldview.
Serial abuse of philosophical jargon is central to Ayn Rand's oeuvre. So let's call it a gesture of minor respect to say that it is "ontologically" impossible to read any book of hers without engaging with her essence.
She clearly wanted it that way, given that expressing her own philosophy was her main reason for writing fiction at all. There is no great mystery to Rand: like concrete buildings, her books are schematically composed. They are structured as arguments, not stories. You are meant to know exactly what they stand for.
Rand never sought to hide this approach to writing, and even bragged about it. "I can give the reason for every word and every punctuation mark in Atlas Shrugged," she once said in a lecture on how to write fiction, "and there are 645,000 words in it by the printer's count."
Ideal, the "new" Ayn Rand novella reprinted this week by the New American Library, contains considerably fewer words and thus, one might deduce, fewer "reasons" than Atlas Shrugged. Maybe that's why Rand never published it as a book, but shoehorned it into a play.