Rand, Ayn (Vol. 30) - Bruce Cook

BRUCE COOK

Miss Rand is a profoundly poor writer. To say that her plots are absurdly tendentious, her characters no more than wooden puppets, and her diction utterly without grace or beauty (all of which is quite true) is to give no real idea of the quality of her novels. They are completely bad, from conception to expression.

All her writing might quite properly be called fantastic. It is not simply that two of her four novels deal with the future,… but rather an atmosphere common to all which is so charged with unreality that it reminds us of nothing quite so much as the dream world of a child….

[Her] opinion of contemporary fiction is so low … that she clearly feels herself uninfluenced by it. And quite rightly, too. Her own writing seems totally free of any realization of the terrifying complexity of the individual soul and the world in which it exists. Such realization, when truly achieved, has rendered many of our finest writers all...

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