Honest question: Is there any literary merit to Atlas Shrugged as a book, its message aside?

[haele]

56. Not really.

Looking at it critically as a work of fiction, it ranks around the Bulwar-Lytton ("It was a dark and stormy night&quot or James Fenimore Cooper level of hyperbole in writing. It's basically an ideological essay on "virtues" - on steroids.
For Dog's sakes, there's a 10 page f'ing speech praising the virtues of "Personal Freedumb" (Selfishness without the self-interest...) that happens in the middle of the luke-warm wedding - that's given by the spurned suiter of the bride, not to mention John Galt's soliliquy.

The protaganists don't have antagonists that are equal to them, and there is not struggle really to be overcome. Their antagonists - that is to say, 99% of the population around them - are so weak, when they decide to stop "bearing the weight of the world", the rest of society just collapses into anarchy, and the only non-wealthy capitalist/inventors - or their heirs - that are left are the faithful toadies that worship the masters.

At least Cooper's protagonists really did require the occasional Deux ex Machina to save their asses and is entertaining in a juvenile play-acting way.

Atlas Shrugged is basically just the type of story that is told at an endless white-tie dinner party to entertain a bunch of rich f'ers who want vindication for fatuously flaunting their inherited wealth and building up their precious little snowglobe existances.

As Dorothy Parker was attributed to have said "This is not a novel to be lightly tossed aside, it is to be thrown with great force..."

Haele