66. W. Somerset Maugham, OF HUMAN BONDAGE

This one's been a while in the making, not only because I started it in installments back in July but because this is the 50th book off the Modern Library list I've read. It only took four years (and a lot of other books in between). Of course, that's a false measurement since I had already read 30 books when I started, so I'm not really halfway through--but to the novel!

Somerset Maugham's best known book begins with the orphaning of Philip Carey, age 9, and follows him through boarding school, adventures abroad, and ultimately into professional life. Along the way, he falls in love, contemplates a life in art and experiences several strata of London life. If you think I'm being vague for a book that's almost 100 years old, you are correct: but that's because you should go out and read it, preferably right away.

I have to pay this novel a high compliment: I didn't always enjoy the company of Philip Carey but his life and the things that happen to him forced me to think. This book depicts, in a way I wouldn't have expected for its age, the way a personality and a belief system can change over time, gaining and shedding layers of itself based on experiences and friendships and hardships. Even reading it in bits and pieces as I did, I found myself returning to earlier passages, wondering who was Philip now? And who now? But it was all a continuum; even the moments where he acknowledged for himself that a change was taking place joined that endless curve rather than throwing up the stop sign of epiphany.

For me OF HUMAN BONDAGE represents the bridge between the "classic" novel pummeling the reader with Lessons and the modern novel for which the presence of a moral is either an insult or evidence of poor writing. Okay, I'm coming down a bit hard on both ends, but to the extent that instructional fiction has gone out of vogue, it is out of vogue now (which is not to say moral fiction isn't being written). I think Somerset Maugham would have had a lot to say to Zoë Heller's conviction about the point of fiction, but he still employs a moral avatar, doesn't he? In a way his predecessors never would have dared, but there it is.

And nothing exemplifies this better than my reactions to the ending, which I will not spoil nor use as a sort of emotional Rorschach test, though it is tempting. (Personally I cycled through vague disappointment and suspicion to recognition of the decisions Philip Carey makes throughout the book, into which the last fits like a puzzle piece -- recognition, but not full acceptance.)

In terms of the Modern Library project, this is one of those books (like THE GOOD SOLDIER) I'm sure I would have gotten around to eventually, but I'm so glad to have read now. Guess I'll have to re-read it in 10 years (in my hovercraft, I assume) to see how it strikes me then. Frankly, it reminded me of when I started looking at this list lo these many months ago, which, now that I'm numerically halfway done, is just the mind I want to have.

LN vs. ML progress: 50 read, 50 unread.

Next up: #22, John O'Hara's APPOINTMENT IN SAMARRA in paper, and from Dailylit, #49, D.H. Lawrence's WOMEN IN LOVE.