I’ve taught some extracted bits and pieces of Atlas Shrugged, but never the whole thing because teaching the entire thing is probably a violation of the Geneva Convention.

My problem with it isn’t the ideology.

It’s that it’s an awful book. Seriously. It’s a truly abysmal piece of writing that I cannot in good conscience call “literature.” Anthem wasn’t terrible, and The Fountainhead was actually decent, but Atlas Shrugged fails in almost every single way as a novel. If I were teaching a course on how not to write a novel, this would be my exemplar text. If I wanted to find anti-examples of quality writing, this would be my go-to. If I let monkeys rip up pages of the collected works of Shakespeare and then had a team of five-year-olds tape the pieces back together into a book binding at random, it would still be a better piece of prose than Atlas Shrugged.

Let’s start with what I’ll generously call a “plot.”

In the story, the overbearing government seizes technologies, assets, etc. and so forth from the wealthy titans of industry, who are all inventors and geniuses, because the economy is taking a nose dive into recession.

The protagonist is the operational vice-president of a railroad company. Her brother is the president, but keeps making bad business decisions, like buying shitty steel from an unreliable supplier, because ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Seriously, this is never explained. There’s not some bailing out a buddy or something, or some sort of kickback, or blackmail, or a traumatic brain injury.

But a steel magnate invents this awesome new form of steel, and the government tries to buy the patent from him, but he refuses. So, the e-ville gubbmint-run science institute puts out a report saying it’s shit (but we won’t tell you why, you know, just don’t buy it okay?!) And so the metal-using businesses of the world just say, “Yeah, seems legit. Sorry, Hank. No super-steel for us.” Like happens all the time in reality. The protagonist goes to the scientist in charge of the agency who put out the report who even agrees that it’s baseless and inaccurate, but won’t retract it because ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

But the protagonist buys it because she’s totes woke AF and not a sheeple who trusts the gubbmint, yo. (You know, or because she read the report and went, “Ummm, there’s really no actual research here that says it’s bad, just a lot of hand waving.”) But all the other CEO sheeples see that she’s using the magic-steel, so they boycott her whole railroad as well. To get around this, the protagonist builds the railroad as a new independent company, because nobody would ever guess it’s the same thing, run by the same people, using the same metal, mysteriously in exactly the same place as where the old one was going to be.

Fast forward a bit and we discover that the steel guy is in a shitty marriage, has the hots for the protagonist because something something author-wish-fulfillment, and they decide to run off together. While on a “business trip,” they stumble on an abandoned factory with a magical unlimited clean energy generator, which the protagonist hires a scientist to reverse engineer.

Then, for some unexplained reason, a guy who used to be hired by the steel guy to be a lobbyist got a better job running a government agency, and because he’s a mustache-twirling bad guy, he issues a bunch of gubbmint edicts because ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. These edicts are bad for industries, which is precisely what you do when in a recession to make it better. In response, an oil guy who was mentioned briefly a ways back as being why the protagonist was building a new railroad (out to his oil fields in Colorado,) decides that the best way to make sure all the oil he’s got sitting in the ground is profitable later is to set the whole place on fire and ride out of town flipping everyone off behind him.

While the protagonist and steel guy are trying to figure out what the fuck just happened, they find out a bunch of business leaders have disappeared and left their companies to just fall apart, because obviously, without them literally nobody else could ever keep those companies going, or competitors wouldn’t be thrilled to suddenly have the market to themselves, or… I know, this novel isn’t very well thought out, is it?

The gubbmint then nationalizes all patents and makes it illegal for anyone to quit their jobs, because again, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. So, because it’s now illegal to do so, the scientist the protagonist hired to reverse engineer the magic motor quits. As the protagonist rushes across the country to talk him out of it, she meets a hobo who explains the magic motor and who invented it and that the gubbmint covered it all up because again, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Then her plane crashes in the desert.

Because no coincidence is too cliche, where the plane crashes just happens to be Galt’s Gulch, which is a no-tax libertarian paradise led by the guy who invented the magic motor that the government covered up that the hobo mentioned. All those business leaders who let the world go to shit are there, because they’re going on strike against society. Because again, if they let their businesses fail, obviously no competitors will enthusiastically be happy to step into the void of competition left and sell alternative products. That’ll learn ’em!

The protagonist immediately falls in love with the leader, John Galt, because the steel guy suddenly didn’t look as awesome as this hunk, and Galt obviously immediately falls in love with her back. Because, fuck you, steel guy. Buuuuut, she decides she really needs to make sure her railroad is okay and wants to go home to check on it. Turns out while she was gone, everything went even further to shit, the government turned into a dictatorship, New York has no electricity, and now the country is all ready to beg pretty please to the businessmen to save them because nobody knows how to do anything except for these handful of titans of the industry.

The magic motor inventor follows the protagonist because again, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, hacks into the radio and television network to deliver a three hour (over 60 page) diatribe explaining Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism and rational selfishness, gets his ass captured by the evil gubbmint, has his supporters break him out, and then the government immediately collapses and Galt announces that it’s fine if he and the other industrial guys just take over, right? Cool? Ok.

All of this takes a bit over eleven hundred pages.

While still a better love story than Twilight, this is just a god-awful disaster of a plot. This plot makes the plot of Napoleon Dynamite look compelling.

The actions of individuals and the government are done only because the plot points that Rand wanted are there, but for no other purpose. The whole thing is forced. Much of the plot is a kludgy mish-mash of unexplained or even abandoned plot threads that never end up getting resolved or are even meaningful to the story. The first protagonist fling serves absolutely no purpose to drive the story forward, and is just abandoned without reason the minute Galt comes along.

The plot doesn’t rise and fall with any tension. There is no act structure. There is no increasing, coherent conflict with any specific antagonist that drives the plot. It is a laundry list of actions and little more.

There’s a number of other plot points that are actively stupid.

There’s a point where a government official is trying to get to a political rally, but the train breaks down, because government sucks. There’s no backup train, because government sucks, except a coal-burning train. Despite the fact that the people in the book actually know that a coal-burning train will kill everyone on board when it goes through a tunnel that’s coming up, the government engineers are afraid that the government is going to be mad at them for pointing that out, drive the train into the tunnel, and kill all three hundred people on board.

Again, this plot moment has no bearing on the plot at all. I didn’t bother with it in the synopsis because it is literally meaningless to what can be laughingly called the main story.

The characters, even the main characters, are completely one dimensional. The protagonist is clearly an author stand-in. This, on its face, would be bad enough, but every character who agrees with the author and protagonist is smart, beautiful, strong, moral, and rewarded with wealth. Every character who stands against her is fat, short, ugly, stupid, lazy, or speaks in nothing but exclamation points. When the protagonist has sex, it’s fantastic mind-blowing lovemaking. When a villain has sex, it’s meaningless hook-ups that aren’t fun.

The steel guy worked his way up from the iron mines, where he started at age 14, and even though it was all painful, the book literally says “he decided that pain was not a valid reason for stopping.” This is painfully prosaic and cliched writing. Also, because you totally learn metallurgy and engineering as a 14 year old doing manual labor in the mines, he got promoted to R&D whilst also being a CEO and invented a new alloy, plus strolled into work one day having come up with a new way of building bridges in the shower.

It’s actually just casually dropped in at various points in the book that the main characters haven’t slept or eaten for days, and it doesn’t affect them at all.

The character actions are frequently purposeless or nonsensical. An appalling number of the characters could have been written out of the story entirely and it would have had zero impact on the narrative.

Some of the attempts to criticize the world as Rand saw it are downright reprehensible.

Remember the coal train and the tunnel? According to Rand in the book, everyone that died totally deserved it because they either supported the government or used some form of government service at some point in their lives. This includes a woman who deserved to die because she *gasp* thought she had a right to vote. There’s also a woman and two children who deserved to die, according to Rand, because their father and husband had a government job.

But more often, Rand relies on a portrayal of the world that has no kernel of reality to it at all. Rand paints a government run not just by incompetent buffoons, but people who seem to actively go out of their way to try and blow up the world, including laws actively prohibiting competition between industries and forcing steel mills to just hand over product to anyone who asks for it for free.

It’s all good and fine to create a dystopia that has no reflection on reality, but if you’re going to use it to prove a point about your form of ethics, it’s not a great way to do it.

As one excellent literary critic pointed out:

The book is a criticism of beliefs that no one holds, a denouncement of an ideology that no one believes in and condemnation of things that no one would ever say. . . . They make speeches that no one would ever make to defend laws that no one would ever pass. There is no criticism of socialism or the Soviet Union or taxes or unions or anything that actually exists. Instead Rand goes to battle against phantom ideologies that only exist in her head.

The “utopia” of Galt’s Gulch is even more inane. The “creative minds” that have all joined together to go on strike against the world, because obviously there are only a select few who are creative and the rest of the world is populated with mindless sheeple, have all fled to her libertarian paradise… where not a single one of them are doing what they’re trained to do.

Not one. Nobody’s practicing their trade.

An aircraft designer is now a pig farmer. A car manufacturer is a lumberjack.

Apparently, resources and the infrastructure to exploit them spring forth like magic, because everyone’s got a shale oil derrick in their yard without any of the obvious problems associated with that, like how to refine that, transport and store it… it’s just so obviously not thought out.

Then there’s the writing itself. This novel could have been pared down to 300 pages and probably made sense, if not for the fact that Rand wanted to take a rhetorical sledgehammer to beat her ideology into the reader, rather than letting them intuit it on their own. There are constant, lengthy, rambling speeches by the various characters extolling the virtues of an unrestricted free market. There are sub-plots that go nowhere, whose purpose is only to tell Rand’s morality tales of unrestricted free enterprise.

Had Rand submitted it to a decent editor who could have chopped out 3/4ths of the book, shaved out the superfluous characters, helped Rand find one coherent antagonist and defined conflict, toned down the proselytizing for Objectivism a bit, and just overall improved the wordsmithing, it could have been a decent book, whether you agreed with the underlying philosophy or not.

Instead, we got this cinder-brick manifesto of mad ramblings that would take even the best of my former AP students a solid 14–16 hours of reading to slog through.

And that brings me to the most logical reason I can think of as to why not only should it not be mandatory reading, it should never be assigned at all.

Assigning the whole thing would piss my students off to no end. It would be nothing but literary punishment. My students would have thoroughly rebelled at having to read the whole thing and asked me what they did wrong to deserve it. It would actively destroy any love of reading that I might have ever instilled in them.

There is barely a single passage that has any redeeming literary value that I could use to teach a skill or as an exemplar of quality work. I can’t think of a single standard I could use the text as a vehicle to try and approach. If I just really wanted to teach something of Ayn Rand’s, The Fountainhead would be a far more engaging piece of literature.

Assigning Atlas Shrugged is like trying to get kids to like eating more vegetables by giving them nothing but two heads of raw kale for dinner every day for two weeks.