Before I Fall

By Lauren Oliver

★★☆☆☆

Two Things I Liked About Before I Fall:

1. Thinking about appreciation for the simplest and most important things in your life.

2. Butterfly effect.

I didn’t like this book. I thought it was inexpertly and unsubtly written – the themes and morals were heavy-handed to an extreme, holding up signs that read, “Look at me! I’m important and meaningful!” in sloppy black sharpie – and the characters, oh boy. Talk about unsympathetic.

Samantha Kingston is your average* high-school girl: she skates along in her classes, has 3 best friends and a boyfriend she’s crushed on since middle school, overcame her un-cool former self, and spends her weekends at parties with the high-school upper crust. Everyone envies her, her life is perfect**, yadda yadda … And then in one split-second on the ride home from a typical Friday night, her life as she knows it comes to an end – literally. That is, until she wakes up again in the morning. Now Sam has seven chances to relive her last day, to untangle the knot of actions and inactions that led to that last moment, and make sense of a senseless tragedy.

This is one of those books where you’re supposed to grow with the character as they learn what makes life beautiful and how to be a better person. Okay, fine. I often like those books – even love them. The problem is that the whole book aimed to add substance to a character that was by nature substanceless, a collection of stereotypes more than an actual person.

Perhaps you think I am not being fair. Perhaps you’d like more evidence.

Samantha and her best friends Elody and Ally are basically the minions of their ringleader, Lindsey, and are apparently so grateful to have been chosen into popularity that they’ll follow Lindsey’s every whim, no matter how reckless or shallow or even cruel, no questions asked. Samantha’s transgressions range from the (relatively) minor: isolating herself from her family, ignoring the (wonderful) boy who’s been in love with her since the 3rd grade, dating an (decidedly un-wonderful) idiot just because he’s hot and popular, and belittling underclassmen and peers alike; to the contemptible: frequently skipping class, smoking and drinking, and flirting with her math teacher; to the unforgivable: relentlessly tormenting a girl to the point of suicide because of some vendetta Lindsey has against her, without ever questioning why.

The kicker? Samantha closes the prologue with the line, “Is what I did really so much worse than what anybody else does? Is it really so much worse than what you do?”

Well, yes, actually. Yes it is.

Uggghhh. I know I’m supposed to sympathize with these characters – I mean, Samantha’s dead, after all, and via a means I wouldn’t wish on anyone – but they’re just so inherently clichéd and unlikeable that instead of sympathizing I just thought, “You brought this on yourself.”***

* Read: Generically stereotyped popular girl with "Real Thoughts" and "Substance" buried deep down under her cruel and conformist façade.

** Rule #1 of character development: never, ever tell me your character is perfect. Seriously. It will turn your readers against you and undermine every attempt you make to give the character substance later.

*** And she did; misdeeds aside, Samantha’s fatal mistake was being stupid enough to get in a car with a drunk Lindsey at the wheel, who’s a dangerous driver even when she’s sober. I mean, come on. It’s sad, of course, but it wouldn’t have happened if she’d made better choices. I get so mad when people end up throwing their life away for stupid things like underage drinking.

Same Story, Different Review:

The Crooked Shelf

Books Read This Year: 18

Top 100 Progress: 38/100

The Fountainhead

By Ayn Rand

★★★★★

The Fountainhead is not so much a novel as it is a treatise on the innate power of the undiluted Self; a trial of society that strips the majority bare and finds them wanting; an anthem to the individual, stoic in the preservation and perseverance of their Self. It’s no stretch to see why Ayn Rand and her work have surpassed mere literature to become a movement. Though it might be more accurate, perhaps, to say that Howard Roark is the source (one could even call him… the fountainhead) of the movement, the infallible and unfaltering integrity of his Self being the movement’s inspiration, aspiration, and very core.

To say that Howard Roark is an architect is to say that J.K Rowling is a writer or that Mozart was a composer – technically accurate, but they are all so much more than their profession that to identify them by it alone seems a gross understatement. Nonetheless, Howard Roark is an architect. An architect who designs wholly original, somewhat austere and unnerving buildings that refuse to conform to popular style. An architect who would – and does – endure menial labor, scapegoating, unemployment, ostracism, forfeit of love and happiness, and criminal trial rather than commit even the most minor betrayal of his principles. He is uncompromising, indefatigable, and utterly without self-doubt – and for that, society seeks to destroy him. The Fountainhead is, essentially, Howard Roark vs. the World. (Of course, you have to remember that this is a 694 page book we're talking about, so it's possible I might be over-simplifying a bit. But you get the gist.)

Roark’s actions, or in some cases, lack of action, in response to this lifelong conflict showcase him to as the embodiment of Rand’s ideal person – wholeheartedly selfish. The word carries strikingly different connotations as used in The Fountainhead than we’re used to, however. Or rather, its definition is the same – self-centered, un-altruistic, close-minded, unsympathetic – but the implications differ. Where by standard usage ‘selfish’ is an insult, denoting a negative or derogatory personality trait, to Ayn Rand it implies full realization and devotion to the Self, a concept integral to the philosophy she was developing whilst writing The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. Selfishness in The Fountainhead is not a vice, but the greatest virtue. It’s putting the undisguised Self forward as one’s character in society, while simultaneously shielding it from any influence of that society. It’s the refusal to lend any components of one’s Self (thoughts, talents, opinions) to others, thereby protecting their integrity from the corruption of collaboration, which compromises each individual’s contribution. It’s the derivation of self-worth, ambition, and satisfaction from the Self, not entrusted to the fickle favor of the outside world – a world which too often converts admiration into condemnation after the passing of some ambiguous, fluctuating expiration date. Above all, it’s the doctrine that an individual is at their best when living in and of and for themselves.

Just as The Fountainhead does not settle for being just a novel, its characters do not settle for being just characters. They become archetypes, vessels of ideas larger than any one characterization or plot function. The ideological intercourse that occurs when the characters interact in various permutations weaves the subtle but sturdy fabric of motives, actions, and pretensions that so thoroughly establishes Ayn Rand’s philosophy. The ideologies behind the archetypes are not so clear, however, that is possible to read The Fountainhead passively. Many of the characters’ personal philosophies become muddled or convoluted at some point or another, requiring the reader to be actively engaged in unraveling them as they read, constantly connecting the dots between actions and the motives they manifest – sometimes contradictory, when characters cannot or will not risk the effort of living up to their beliefs or their Self. The only character, in fact, whose actions and motives are never muddled or counteracted, but remain pure and focused, is Howard Roark – apt, as he is the paradigm of Ayn Rand’s idyllic selfish man, intransigent and unambiguous in the upholding of his principles.

I have a feeling that this is one of those versatile books that ought to be read at intervals throughout one’s life, because it's a novel of ideas, and we react differently to ideas depending on myriad variables to do with our personalities, knowledge, and experiences. We'll extrapolate different meanings and understandings from the text with each reading based on what we bring to it. As a college student, my reading instructed me to “go confidently in the direction of my dreams and live the life I’ve imagined*,” but I expect that if I were to read the book again in as few as four years from now I may well take something entirely different away from it. For those of you who’ve read it, I’d love to know when, what you gleaned from it, and what you thought/think of Ayn Rand’s philosophy!

*Quote adapted from Henry David Thoreau.