I don’t love Ayn Rand. The novels are terrible! They’re as polemical as the worst essay-novels. I mean, it’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull for conservatives! Every high school kid with two bits of brain goes through a Rand phase and hopefully later starts to like things with some ambiguity.

(If you want a great work of literature about Randian themes that has some merit read Kurt Vonnegut’s finest short story, Harrison Bergeron)

Fine, fine. She’s all about freedom. Okay, great. I can respect that philosophically, and I think she had important (if not, well, wrong) things to say. I’m just saying: she’s a terrible, terrible novelist. Don’t worry: so is Harold Bloom. So are lots of folks who are great at other things.

Look at the back of an Ayn Rand book: you won’t see one blurb from a writer.