For me The Fountainhead made a major impression when I first read it in college, but then some years passed and I started to think that Howard Roark and Dominique Francon were rather extreme and I also started feeling less pitiful contempt for Catherine Halsey and even Peter Keating. Now I read it and get distracted by all the side characters in the many-peopled plot and wonder about their more detailed backstories. (And kudos to Rand for making them resonate so vividly, whether she intended to or not.) Like the weak-willed, porcelain-obsessed Lucius Heyer or wily newspaperman Alvah Scarret, or the misguidedly violent sculptor Steven Mallory. Or the Chinese student artist who works with Roark at John Erik Snyte's architecture office. The Chinese student never says a word because minorities don't really factor into The Fountainhead, but this nameless artist with no dialogue is as memorable as some of the novel's more heavy-handed characters. Snyte has the student on staff to draw up plans for final presentation to clients. In another scene, the Chinese artist steps aside "diffidently, in silence" when a client is brought into the drafting room by Snyte, then he returns to his desk and keeps on drawing unobtrusively, unacknowledged. You have to wonder about this Asian man living in New York in the 1920s and his artistic training, and what it was like for him to work at a high-pressure Manhattan architectural firm where no one seemed to ever call him by -- or perhaps no one ever really knew -- his actual name.
And let's not forget Jules Fougler, New York drama critic, his voice "slow, nasal and bored." Fond of wearing gloves and carrying a cane, he resembles two "sagging circles" set on top of each other in a beautifully tailored suit the color of goose shit or merde d'oie as Fougler describes it.
"Examine my case, if you will [Fougler said]...What achievement is there for a critic in praising a good play? None whatever. The critic is then nothing but a kind of glorified messenger boy between author and public. What's there in that for me? I'm sick of it. I have a right to wish to impose my own personality upon people. Otherwise, I shall become frustrated--and I do not believe in frustration."
Do we see Fougler again or is he crucial to the plot? Not really. But is it interesting to wonder where he went afterwards and/or if he had Waldorf salad for lunch? Yes, I kind of think so.
