“Atlas Shrugged” never offered any serious alternative to the social order; whatever Rand’s intention, the novel was not a call to arms but an invitation to escape. The book could never, in fact, have been any shorter, because it needed to feel like a whole substitute world, a full-blown reassuring place—you’re right, they’re wrong; you’re special, they’re not—into which the discoverer can jump, as into a magic wardrobe, and then live, happily, airlessly, for weeks of reading and rereading.”

Thomas Mallon has an entertaining takedown of Ayn Rand’s caterwauling, tone-deaf fiction in the New Yorker. A subscription is required to read the whole thing, but it’s worth tracking down, if only for the line, “The O. Henry she describes bears more resemblance to the candy bar than to the story writer.”

A more thorough takedown of the Goddess of Greed is available in Ayn Rand: The Comic.