Books: The Solid-Gold Dollar Sign

ATLAS SHRUGGED (1,168 pp.)—Ayn Rand—Random House ($6.95).

Is it a novel? Is it a nightmare? Is it Superman—in the comic-strip or the Nietzschean version? During the book's opening passages—for 300 or 400 pages, that is—the reader cannot be sure. Then the truth emerges: Author Ayn Rand, a sort of literary Horsewoman of the Apocalypse, is smashing the world with half a million words in order to rebuild it according to her own philosophy. And that philosophy must be read to be disbelieved.

The time is the near future; the place, the U.S.; the heroine, beautiful Dagny Taggart, a stainless-steel executive who runs a transcontinental railroad with the same chilling efficiency she displays in bed with various deserving tycoons. But dauntless Dagny is having troubles. Her railroad keeps breaking down. The best businessmen begin to vanish mysteriously. Oilfields flame in the night, copper mines are destroyed, docks blow skyhigh, steel mills collapse in chaos. Finally Dagny catches on: her fellow capitalists have gone on strike.

Capitalist Shangri-La. Bitter over high taxes, Government interference, the scorn of intellectuals and the reproof of religious leaders, the really tough-minded tycoons gradually withdraw from society to a hideout in the mountains. There, under the leadership of a mysterious physicist named John Gait, they await the fall of the old, Socialist-crippled, soft and degenerate order, so they can build a new society. The mountain-ringed capitalist Shangri-La sounds like a prospectus for an exclusive, upper-middle-class suburb in Westchester, and is dominated by a slim granite column upholding a solid-gold dollar sign. (Readers who may suspect at this point that Author Rand's intention is satire could not be more mistaken.)

Author Rand's world shares many characteristics of science fiction—the blue-tinted fluorescent light of literary unreality; the dogged logic with which the illogical is propped up; the melodramatic simplicity that requires no score cards to tell heroes from villains. Such paladins of power and profit as Physicist John Gait, Steelmaker Hank Rearden, Billionaire Francisco d'Anconia all have noble, proudly lifted heads, clear blue (or green) eyes, frank, open expressions. Such blackguards as traitorous Businessman Orren Boyle, Bureaucrat Cuffy Meigs, Parasite Philip Rearden have eyes that are "pale and veiled" or "small black slits" or "blurred brown"; they can never meet anyone's gaze; they have hangdog expressions and poor postures. In fact, the struggle is so unequal that it is a wonder it takes the capitalist underground twelve years and more than 1,000 pages to win it.