Fountainhead - My Thoughts on the Book

Today I’m going to review the book that I’ve always avoided reviewing. Fountainhead has always left me with ambivalent feelings. When my friends ask me about it, I answer cautiously. Do I love the work for Ayn Rand’s genius characterization? Or do I hate it for its extremist and cold perspective on mankind? Though as I think harder now, I think it’s a little bit of both. I like the book because it IS brilliant; but i ALSO think the book is an extremely arrogant, cold take on life and its players. Let me elaborate.

Plot Summary
A poor and brilliant architect, who refuses to compromise on his principles, must battle poverty, credit-snatching colleagues, rejection, slander, manipulation of a devious but popular journalist, and finally imprisonment, to achieve his freedom to live and work in his own way.

Principal Characters
Howard Roark: A brilliant but poor architect, and an individualist. He is the man who believes his work talks for him. Too bad then that the world is not fair and people will take credit for whatever they can. He goes through a lot of struggle and rejection, but later makes it big. This is his story—how the individualist fights the credit-snatchers and devious people. The book, though, does not talk about the childhood of its protagonist at all, besides a few lines thrown in. I thought this was a serious oversight. We are not told how or why Roark becomes what he is. Rand does, however, delve into the childhood of some other characters, and rightly so.

Dominique Francon: The Yin to Roark’s Yang. Unlike Roark though, she is born to a rich father, a famous architect. She despises her father for his utter lack of passion and conviction for his work, and his greed for wealth (but continues using his wealth). An individualist herself, she’s also extremely arrogant, beautiful, and an art-reviewer famous in her own right.

Gail Wynand: One of the negative characters in the book. But as another negative character (Ellsworth Toohey) points out, he is less evolved in his power hunger. A Publishing Czar, among other things, he is used to having his way. He is ruthless, manipulative, and extremely vindictive. Falls in love with Dominique, totally and for the first time, only to find that she is in love with Roark, who is by then his best friend.

Ellsworth Toohey: For me, this is the most brilliantly concocted character ever, and also the scariest. For Toohey is power-hungry, just like Wynand. But unlike Wynand, Toohey is subtle. He goes about controlling people in an apparently innocent but effectively deadlier way. He is intentionally poor, but has his tentacles in all major organizations and communities. Everyone sees him as an Expert on Art and a selfless do-gooder. But the scariest of his principles is this: he believes that all genius must be nipped in the bud, because genius can think for itself and influence people, and hence cannot be controlled. So to kill genius, he calls it mediocre or downright bad. Since he is seen as an authority on Architecture, he actually manages to pull down Roark’s genius (for a while) by this strategy. Deadly.

Peter Keating: The weakest character in the book. Peter is the shallow and untalented charmer. He charms his way through school and office, making Roark do his school assignments first, and later his office assignments too. (Roark works for him apparently for money to survive, but given his ideals, he should have resisted.) But one day, Keating’s luck runs out. He marries Dominique out of lust and greed and breaks the heart of his longtime sweetheart. Marriage to Dominique shatters all the deception he has built around himself. He is forced to confront what he is—a pathetic weakling, who does not mind trading his wife’s body for a prestigious assignment. From then on, Keating becomes a wreck, eaten by his conscience, till even his over-ambitious mother regrets pushing her son towards something he was never meant to achieve.


The book is very intense and very opinionated. Rand’s philosophy is that people who are talented and work hard must always guard themselves from people who want credit without the toil. That’s true of course. But the way she goes about telling this truth is what fills me with ambivalent feelings. Roark, for the most part of the book, comes across as devoid of feelings. He rarely says what he thinks (except in the end, when he is on a roll), so we don’t know if the man is human at all. The warmth in this character, the humanness, is just not there. He is a genius and an ethical boss, but that’s it. His one strong emotion is his love for Dominique, though even that is a little weirdly portrayed (the first time they make love is when he rapes her). Similarly, Dominique is intelligent, but hard. She looks down on everybody, including her father, yet does not mind using his wealth. There is a hypocrisy to this character that Rand could have done without. But for the most of it, you just can’t argue with Ayn Rand’s genius for realism. The book is humungous, but gripping. And all said and done, she does seem to write with passion and conviction, highly valuable qualities for a writer.