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Of course, the doers of the world will not remain on strike forever. Once the bad of the world is defeated, they will once again rise up and take their rightful places in society. Until then, well, Colorado is a lovely place to hide out from ills of political experiments gone woefully wrong.

Dagny Taggart, one of the few people at Taggart Transcontinental with a functioning brain, is strong, beautiful, long-legged, and alarmingly capable. You know, she can drive a train and pilot a plane (though, as the story reveals – I am not going to be precious about spoilers here, by the way – not very well; she crashes into the strikers’ Shangri-la). She is also the object of lust for pretty much all the major male characters, save the pirate.

John Galt, the man behind the national catch-phrase “Who is John Galt” (lesson two: all of our wacky sayings have a root in some sort of weird reality), is Dagny’s male equal with a twist. Hmm, two twists. He doesn’t run a railroad, in fact, he hasn’t really done much in the way of business magnating at all (he’s an engineer, it’s forgivable). He has also left the world behind while Dagny, somewhat quixotically, chooses to fight losing battle after losing battle. She will not Give Up, while he has seen the future and it will not come to pass until she does.

As is critically important in all romance novels, the first important step is that boy must meet girl. Rand plays with the formula a bit – perhaps following the less rigid strictures of classic Mills & Boon (before they became codified into today’s romance novel) – by throwing a secondary love interest, Hank Rearden into the mix. Of course, he’s married, so we all know that this relationship is doomed to failure.

Rand also teases us with the re-appearance of Dagny’s childhood-friend-turned-enemy Francisco d’Anconia. Sure, Dagny adored the idealistic youth, but the jaded, profligate playboy is another matter. How, she wrings her hands in worry, can he allow his business to suffer so? Helpfully, she ignores all of his words and concentrates on what she perceives to be his actions. It would be a much shorter book if she actually paid attention to what her adored Frisco is really saying.

I digress. The truth of the matter is that once you have reached any age over 25, there is much about Atlas Shrugged that can be skimmed. Rand does love to drive home her points and philosophy. Of course, she insists on doing so while her characters are at dinner parties and having cocktails. If someone were to climb up on the soapbox during martini hour in this day and age, they would probably get the same reception as Rand’s heroes.

Yeah, well, there’s a time for deep philosophy and a time for losing yourself in the glory of a well-mixed Manhattan.

Sorry. I digressed from my digression.

The point is, when Dagny meets John Galt, we all know that this is the man for her. Rearden knows it. Francisco knows it. Everyone in Shangri-la knows it. Dagny knows it. Galt, being all-seeing and all-knowing, has always known it. Rand again plays with the romance formula, in the case, the classic “I hate you, I hate you, I hate you, kiss me you fool, I love you” trope. This type of conflict, conflict that is generally a mask for courtship, all happens before Dagny and Galt meet.

Neat, huh? It’s like Rand has redefined the romance novel. This allows the two lovers to move forward (and by move forward, I mean many, many pages of text) by realizing that their real battle is to be fought against the enemy who might tear them apart forever. You know, the life and death battle that leads to the all-important Black Moment.

Thus our characters are torn apart. If they so much as glimpse each other (other than for furtive sex in the tunnel – yeah, you need a more obvious metaphor than that?), all is lost. But they cannot stay apart!

But you know this is a romance novel and even though the entire Northern corner of the United States has been blasted and leveled and everyone’s pretty much dead (not to mention the fact that entire continent’s infrastructure is destroyed), all will work out just fine. Rand will not fail the romance structure. It feels dicey, surely the end is near, maybe, just maybe the good guys will fail…

Of course I’m joking. Rand embraced all aspects of the American dream in this novel. The happy ending is all but guaranteed. Naturally, you will read through to the end to verify, but you can trust the author here.

Now, I am not suggesting that Atlas Shrugged is a great romance novel. The writing is clunky, the emotional scenes lack any real feeling (one exception is the touching scene when Rearden comes upon the dying Wet Nurse – the idealistic youth placed by the government to spy on Rearden – and gives the boy fatherly comfort). Dagny and Galt are meeting on an intellectual plane, not a physical plane. That they are both physically perfect is just pure good luck.

(If I weren’t the lazy sort, I would also spend some time here analyzing the homoerotic aspects of this novel; the relationship between Francisco and Rearden is especially interesting when you try to read too much into the text).

When you are young, you read Ayn Rand to bolster your irrepressible idealism. When you are old, you see that the very black-and-white world of people like Dagny and Galt isn’t so crisp and clear. And when you are really old or maybe just one who looks for love in all the wrong places, you see that Rand, like most people, is really just a romantic at heart.

You can buy Atlas Shrugged here or here.