Let’s take some time to look in detail with how Rand executes the features we’ve identified. We can make the trouble with Rand’s writing stand out in bold relief when we compare Roark’s portrayal in The Fountainhead with Nabokov’s of Luzhin in The Defence in these terms.
Affirming our opposition to bad art and banal thought is satisfying and often necessary. In the few days after I’d immersed myself back into the sludgy consistency of Rand’s novel, with all its bald and unchallenged commonplaces, I felt a real need to vent distaste, even just as cathartic resistance. Schadenfreude is fun, but it can get close to bad conscience if that’s all we’re doing – often something of an online speciality. Spending our whole time decrying the bad doesn’t cut it – something that Rand herself would have done well to mark: for all her pleas of positive virtue created by individuals, the majority of The Fountainhead is spent sneering at the trivially dismissable.