Top 10 Novels

I am a sucker for 'best of' lists and for good prose, and I recently came across a writer who provided both.

W. Somerset Maugham is an author that I avoided for years and for no good reason. I suppose I was turned off by the title of his most famous work, Of Human Bondage, which implied an abundance of depression and misery. This winter, however, I came across an admiring mention of Maugham by Lawrence Block (an author whose works I love), so I decided to give him a shot. A novel, a memoir, and a few short stories later, I'm kicking myself for waiting so long.

I first read The Razor's Edge, which I knew only as the basis of the movie that gave Bill Murray his first non-comedic role.

Ambulance driver turned Buddhist monk; later he will bust ghosts.

Well, the book turned out to be great. Maugham writes with deceptive clarity and elegance: he reads quickly, but is not simple or trite. He is a master craftsman, and master craftsmen make their art look easy. As Block points out in one of his excellent books about writing, Maugham is especially good at manipulating and shifting the point of view from which he tells a story.

As has often been the case with writers I discover late, I had no idea how much Maugham wrote and in how many different genres. I have so far made it through several of his short stories and one of his memoirs, but he also wrote many plays, which was this genre that brought him his first taste of wealth and fame and allowed him eventually to live at the Villa Mauresque on the coast of France:

What the ability to write well can get you.

Like all good writers, Maugham read a lot, and his opinions and observations on the works of others makes for engrossing reading. His most sustained attempt in this genre is The Art of Fiction: An Introduction to Ten Novels and Their Authors, which contains, essentially, his thoughts on what he regards as the ten best novels. And those ten are:

Fielding, Tom Jones

Austen, Pride and Prejudice

Stendhal, The Red and the Black

Balzac, Le Père Goriot

Dickens, David Copperfield

Flaubert, Madame Bovary

Melville, Moby-Dick

Bronte, Wuthering Heights

Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
Tolstoy, War and Peace

Maugham admits that he just as easily could have listed the following ten novels as the best of all time:

Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

James, The Ambassadors

Stendhal, The Charterhouse of Parma

Sterne, Tristram Shandy

Thackeray, Vanity Fair

Eliot, Middlemarch 

Lesage, Gil Blas

Austen, Persuasion

Balzac, Cousin Bette

One could certainly come up with another list just as good as these, but Maugham's twenty books are by any estimation a formidable and respectable lot. I willingly admit that I have read only seven of them. It would be a fun project to read all twenty.