Purporting to be a novel, Atlas Shrugged is a cumbersome, lumbering vehicle in which characterization, plot and reality are subordinated to the author's expression of a personal philosophy. The book is a point of view stated and restated so often that even one who agreed with it would tire long before the book was completed.

Ayn Rand, whose last novel, The Fountainhead, was widely read fourteen years ago and was greeted with mixed reception from the critics, envisages a not-too-distant future in which society crumbles under the impact of the welfare state. Miss Rand, whose private obsession is private enterprise, has woven a story around this supposed disintegration. Several of her heroes, believing the society in which they live is a burden to them, systematically set out to help it destroy itself, thereby aiding the villains of the piece who by their insistence on government controls of business...