Like most Rand characters, Gonda (inspired by Greta Garbo, according to Leonard Peikoff, the executor of Rand’s estate, in an introduction he wrote to this book) is less a person than a speechifying symbol, and her story never rises even a smidgen above the preposterous. The reader instantly understands why this novel, written in 1934, was set aside by Rand and not published until now, and why the play version (also in this volume) was not produced during her lifetime.

Image The writer and philosopher Ayn Rand in New York in 1957. Credit... Allyn Baum/The New York Times

The story is an ugly, diagrammatic illustration of Rand’s embrace of selfishness and elitism and her contempt for ordinary people — the unfortunate, the undistinguished, those too nice or too modest to stomp and roar like the hard man Howard Roark in “The Fountainhead.” It underscores the reasons that her work — with its celebration of defiance and narcissism, its promotion of selfishness as a philosophical stance — so often appeals to adolescents and radical free marketers. And it is also a reminder of just how much her didactic, ideological work actually has in common with the message-minded socialist realism produced in the Soviet Union, which she left in the mid-1920s and vociferously denounced.

The only redeeming feature of “Ideal” is that both the novel and play are slender works, giving Rand less space to bloviate than in “Atlas Shrugged” and “The Fountainhead.” As it is, her characters here make comically portentous statements and engage in breathless, grandiose exchanges.

Gonda says to one fan: “I kill the things men live for. But they come to see me, because I make them see that they want those things killed.” And she has this conversation with another:

“Ah, Johnnie, Johnnie, of what account is life?”

“None. But who made it so?”

“Those who cannot dream.”

“No. Those who can only dream.”

The point throughout much of this novel and play — as it is in much of Rand’s work — is that most people are sniveling fools or sheepish sheep, afraid to pursue their dreams or claw their way to the top: They are hypocrites unable to live up to their professed ideals, cowards who live vicariously through others. There’s a henpecked businessman who throws Gonda over in favor of toadying to his nagging wife and his harridan of a mother-in-law. There’s an artist who specializes in portraits of Gonda but doesn’t recognize her in person. And there’s an evangelist who urges Gonda to confess when she comes to him, seeking refuge.