Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Atlas Shrugged came highly recommended, and, as I had been impressed by Rand's earlier The Fountainhead, decided to try this longer book. If you don't expect any characterization or plot, and don't mind a highly repetitive hammering of a particular philosophical stance, you might find it tolerable. In fact, had the same storyline been told in 150-200 pages, it might not have been as bad-but at 1100+ pages, it was seriously stretched. ALL the "good guys" are exceptionally competent polymaths, and are uniformly handsome, striking, and healthy. ALL the "bad guys" are seriously incompetent and have substantial physical flaws. Just by the description of a character--often running more than a page--you can tell where they stand. All the "good guys" speak the same; there is no way to identify who is speaking from their speech patterns, word choice, phrasing, punctuation, or anything else: they're essentially verbal clones of each other, and all of them are promoting the same philosophy. The same applies to the "bad guys", though they espouse a couple of (minor) variations on their philosophy, and one of them--a fairly minor one--could actually be identified by his speech patterns. The rest, again, were verbal and philosophical clones. None of the major characters developed in any meaningful way. Some of them learned some facts, but none of them achieved any real growth. In fact, the only people who changed in any substantial fashion were minor characters, and many of them only did so immediately before dying. One of the characters makes a speech in the later part of the book. That speech, which we were told was highly effective to the listeners, was not well phrased, well organized, nor fashioned in such a way as to keep any audience from falling asleep. That speech alone took 60 pages, with no interruptions or commentary from any other character; I had to take a break partway through, and ended up skimming the last 20-odd pages, as it was highly repetitious, both to itself, and everything else in the novel. The author could more effectively have elided it, and had a few characters talk about it in 2-3 pages; instead, the readers were treated to yet another repetition what had been repeated many times before. From a philosophical standpoint, if Atlas Shrugged were shorter, from a novella to a very short novel, I could honestly suggest it to someone interested in the viewpoint Rand was pushing. At 1100 pages, I cannot. It may be the worst novel I've ever bothered to finish; I kept hoping there would be something worthwhile in upcoming pages--a key character flaw the author argued against, in fact: hope based on a lack of acceptance of historical facts. It had no plot, no characterization, no character development or growth, poor dialog, and the most blatant hammering of a philosophical stance I've ever seen, spread out over substantially too many pages. (For the record, I'm almost entirely in agreement with the position promoted by the protagonists. I don't disapprove of the message, merely the delivery--repeating the same thing a few hundred times doesn't make it any more convincing.)