The Man Who Loved Ayn Rand: Review

[Nathaniel Branden] was 14 years old in 1944 when he picked up his sister's copy of ''The Fountainhead,'' the symbol-clashing epic of Howard Roark, a ruggedly handsome genius architect in mortal combat with a pedestrian world. During the next four years he reread the novel ''almost continuously,'' transported to the mountaintop ''where the issues I cared about really mattered.'' In all closed systems of thinking, what seems at first a thrilling key to personal productivity and an airtight explanation for the world's many ills ossifies with time into a nightmare trap of doublethink and intellectual terror. Name-calling was rampant in the Objectivist movement. Deviationists were scorned as ''whim-worshippers,'' Mr. Branden writes; backsliders insufficiently understood their ''context.'' The cardinal sin was to let one's emotions overrule one's mind. Ms. [Ayn Rand]'s personal taste in literature -she detested Thomas Wolfe, was bored by Shakespeare and gushed over Mickey Spillane - was elevated to canon. Mr. Branden's long-suffering wife, Barbara, Objectivism's second-ranking disciple, began looking elsewhere for her emotional satisfaction. It dawned on Mr. Branden that nobody was having fun. ''Do you realize,'' I said to her, ''that I've known you half my life?'' She looked at me silently and suspiciously. I went on, ''A year after I left home, I acquired a new one - in a manner of speaking. You might say, I've never been really on my own. Sometimes I wonder if that's healthy.'' ''Getting tired of a serious, philosophical life?'' she asked sharply. ''You're on your own now, in every way that counts. Unless you mean - you want to be free of me?'' ''Free of you? I want us to be friends forever.'' ''Friends is not what I'm talking about! What new irrationality is this? Do you think I would have dedicated Atlas Shrugged to a friend? I've told the whole world that you are Objectivism. Do you think I would say that about a friend? What's the matter with you? Don't you attach meaning to the words you speak? Where has your mind gone?''