The Fountainhead is one of the most controversial books ever written that nobody has ever read, because, let’s face it: it’s massive. Fortunately, if you haven’t read it, you’ll never have to, because I read it four years ago and now I’m going to summarize it so that you can sound smart at some party where people use words like “partisan” and only drink liquor from non-plastic bottles.

The Fountainhead was written by a woman named Ayn Rand, which you’re going to want to pronounce as “Ine Rand” if you don’t want to sound like a primate. It’s essentialy a brilliant work of fantasy, the construct of a richly detailed alternate universe in which people actually give two damns about architecture. The book’s protagonist is a bloke named Howard Roark, and he’s there to symbolize the person that Ayn Rand would most like to make sex with, which is why he’s introduced naked atop a cliff with extremely taut shoulders. Roark lives with Peter Keating and Keating’s mother, who’s very proud of her son for graduating from Architect School, which Roark has just been kicked out of for his anarchistic beliefs that buildings don’t need to resemble the Parthenon anymore, because of things like Steel and America. Keating serves as a foil to Roark, because he doesn’t really care that much about Steel or America and his shoulders are almost entirely un-taut.

While Keating goes to work for Guy Francon at Fancy Architects and Sons, Inc., Roark seeks employment from Henry Cameron, an aging washed up alcoholic that ruined his career by designing buildings that looked like boxes and not at all like the Parthenon. Keating advances his position in the social strata by dating the niece of Ellsworth Toohey, a sickly man with the most un-taut shoulders on the planet who’s goal in life is to gain so much social influence that he can singlehandedly doom the release of the next Surfjan Stevens album. This is very tough for Keating, because Toohey’s niece’s hair is, like, really crappy, but she’s really compassionate toward poor people and her uncle could skyrocket his career. Meanwhile, Roark listens to Henry Cameron rant drunkenly about not having any work to do for a few months, at which point Cameron dies of failure and Roark gets a gig and opens his own office.

Whilst designing buildings that look like the Parthenon for Guy Francon, Keating meets Francon’s daughter, Dominique, and falls madly in love with her. Dominique is there to represent the woman with which Ayn Rand would most like to make sex with, described as having “the tautest of shoulders, like a building,” and “long black hair, like a building”. Ellsworth hears that Roark is telling everybody how amazing the Surfjan Stevens album is and punishes him by giving the only building he’s ever designed a scathing review for resembling a box way too much. Finding himself broke, Roark is forced to go to work drilling rocks for 19 hours a day, where he now meets Dominique for some reason. Dominique totally crushes on him and decides to break her fireplace as an excuse to invite him over to fix it, by which he responds by calling her out on her ploy and then borderline raping her, as is tradition.

Roark eventually finds more work because somebody emphasizes with his fetish for Steel and America, and he reopens his office. Meanwhile, Dominique marries Keating because she’s upset that she doesn’t want to date Roark.

At some point around here, Roark gets a gig to design a building that’s supposed to be some sort of monument to spirituality and accidentally makes it an ode to Atheism, hiring Stephen Mallory to sculpt a statue version of a nude Dominique in the middle of it, which has breasts that are “firm, like buildings”. Mallory once tried to kill Toohey for being a phoney, but Toohey didn’t press charges because Mallory also thought that Surfjan Stevens’ latest album lacked an inspired voice.

Roark’s Atheist monument is a massive failure, and a man ends up purchasing the nude statue because he finds it obscenely beautiful and wants to lock it away so that  nobody else can ever see it. He does this sort of thing because creativity irks him, because he hasn’t had time to write enough poetry in his lifelong pursuits of being uber-rich. His name is Gail Wynand, and he owns Walmart or something. Dominique ends up marrying Wynand, who Roark considers his nemesis, after her marriage to Keating fails to upset her enough. Wynand then hires Roark to build a really tall skyscraper for him that is to be “very tall, like a building”, and urges him to hang out with him and his wife a lot because he doesn’t know about the fireplace and the grey-area-rape stuff.

While working on the skyscraper, Roark is approached by a bloated Keating who’s been trying to drink himself to death in the wake of his realization that he can’t stand architecture. Keating wants Roark to design a building for him, and Roark agrees to do it for free because he loves to doodle, but only on the condition that none of his designs are changed.

When Roark sees the completed building that he designed for Keating, he totally flips his poop because it has some rods and stuff on it that don’t really need to be there, and so he blows the entire thing up with dynamite. This gets a lot of attention from the media, which is owned entirely by Toohey, who owns The Huffington Post and Pitchfork Media, and Wynand, who owns Fox News. Wynand tries to defend Roark’s explosion on Fox News and almost goes bankrupt as a result, and his wife has sex with Roark in a cabin.

Roark explains to a jury that you can’t just go and screw with a Man’s doodles and they find him innocent of exploding half a city block, and Toohey’s all, like, “man that sucks,” and then Dominique rides an elevator to the top of Wynand’s skyscraper where her and Roark probably have sex again because that would be pretty awesome.

And that’s pretty much the book, give or take the vast majority of the plot.

Rating: 4.5 Buildings