I’ve had a lot of time to read during my recent travels and recently finished a few novels by Kay Nolte Smith: The Watcher, Elegy for A Soprano, and Mindspell. Smith was part of Ayn Rand’s circle and wrote aesthetic commentaries for The Objectivist, and her fiction writing is very heavily influenced by Rand. Many of the sentences are an almost eerie imitation of Rand’s style. Of course Smith was excommunicated like everyone else, and certainly is persona non grata for using Rand as the model for the murder victim in Elegy for A Soprano. But her writing is touched in places with brilliance, and although I’ve never been a fan of murder mysteries, hers are intriguing and often very intelligent.
The Watcher was her first novel. In echoes of Rand’s play Think Twice, it centers around the death of a supposed philanthropist whose doctrines of self-sacrifice are really based on a hatred for achievement and uniqueness. But what makes Smith different than Rand is Smith’s greater focus on the psychology of the characters rather than the philosophy per se. Of course Rand did focus on her characters’ psychology—particularly in The Fountainhead and in the character of Hank Rearden in Atlas Shrugged—but she saw their psychology (rightly) as a function of their philosophical dedications, and therefore targeted those dedications primarily. Smith doesn’t do this: she puts the characters’ psychology in the forefront, and holds up the characters for our examination. This is both a virtue and a flaw—the flaw being that it comes at the expense of her plots, particularly in Elegy for A Soprano.
Now, Elegy is the most accurate, sympathetic, and interesting insight into the relationship between a genius and his or her acolytes that I have read since John Knowles’ A Separate Peace, and a comparison of the two novels would be very interesting. The theme of these works (and of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, on which Knowles’ book is based) is the way that the true genius draws in other peoples’ souls like a whirlpool. In A Separate Peace, Phinny’s greatness is simply sucking Gene’s independence away, and Gene reacts in the only way he can figure out—by fighting back physically, just as the Romans kill Caesar to insist on their independence, and just as the murderer kills Vardis in Elegy for a Soprano. But where the breakdown comes in Elegy—the reason it is less satisfying than Separate Peace or Caesar—is in what Rand called the “plot-theme.” The theme is simply not dramatized effectively. The basic plot of Elegy is that the investigator goes around asking questions, which the murder suspects openly answer without hesitation and without anyone ever lying! This is simply too unrealistic.
Smith often falls into this trap—a trap common to romanticism. In fact, many of Smith’s works suffer from the typical weaknesses of romantic literature, particularly wild coincidences. This is true of Mindspell, for instance, my favorite of these three novels. As in some of the more deplorable works of Charles Dickens, two of the important characters in Mindspell turn out miraculously to be related, having somehow managed to fall into each other’s company in Manhattan.
Still, Mindspell is a powerful and exciting novel; well-written, compellingly told, and often brilliantly dramatized. I particularly enjoyed the way the overlapping themes of the work were brought out in the action. Without giving too much away, suffice to say that one of the themes of the novel is the capacity of human beings to use their minds to overcome their genetic inheritance, and this theme is demonstrated not only by the main character’s occupation as a genetic researcher, but by the love story and by the mystery plot as well, all climaxing in a really powerful concluding sequence. While it too has flaws, Mindspell is the book that most belongs next to Rand’s.
The Watcher’s murder plot is also weak, although it is stronger than the plot of Elegy. But its theme—of a person giving up his dreams and becoming a “watcher” who stands on the sidelines of life—is a powerful one and brought out very strongly in the characters’ own lives. The book seethes with idealism, the sort of idealism that makes a person ravishingly beautiful.
Here are a couple of sites on Kay Nolte Smith. I disagree pretty strongly with some of Greg Swann’s comments, particularly his view that Mindspell is somehow “subversive Objectivism” or in any sense contrary to it. The story is not about breaking the bonds with one’s family—it’s about asserting independence over one’s alleged biological determinism, and the plot captures this brilliantly and subtly. Subtlety, of course, is not a common feature in Objectivist literature! I certainly see no evidence to support Swann’s claim that “for Smith, ‘mother’ is the fountainhead of identity.” For Smith, as for Rand, one’s ideas are the fountainhead of identity.
I look forward to reading more of her work.
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