Loud

I’m going to leave aside here the dubious taste of anyone who’d admit they read and liked Rand. If you plotted Literary Merit on the x-axis versus Book Sales on the y-axis, the slope of the line for Rand’s oeuvre would be undefined, a perfect vertical up and down. She’s atrocious with dialogue, unconvincing with sex, clumsy with pacing, heavy-handed with foreshadowing, lousy with clichés. (I’d add character development if she included any human beings in her stories.) I’m embarrassed for her, and she died in 1982.