In 2005, on the 100th anniversary of Rand's birth, Edward Rothstein, writing for "The New York Times", referred to her fictional writing as quaint utopian "retro fantasy" and programmatic neo-Romanticism of the misunderstood artist while criticizing her characters' "isolated rejection of democratic society". In 2007, book critic Leslie Clark described her fiction as "romance novels with a patina of pseudo-philosophy". In 2009, "GQ"s critic columnist Tom Carson described her books as "capitalism's version of middlebrow religious novels" such as "" and the "Left Behind" series. Reviewing the posthumously published novel "Ideal", "The New York Times" chief book critic Michiko Kakutani assessed Rand's "didactic, ideological work" as stylistically having a great deal "in common with the message-minded socialist realism produced in the Soviet Union, which she left in the mid-1920s and vociferously denounced".