What Are You Reading These Days?

by Marc Berlin

An old favorite. A reading group I belong to decided to choose the latest round of books on the basis of the question: what book would you recommend to others as a lifetime must-read? Not just a personal favorite or a guilty pleasure but a book you can both recommend and happily defend as your choice. My choice was echoed by another member of the group; we both said in almost unison: W. Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge.

Maugham is an author that critics and academics like to scorn and readers like to read. He considered himself just a storyteller, as if there was room for anything else in the novel besides storytelling, and famously rated himself as among the very best of the second rate novelists. His detractors hastened to agree but I do not. It is true that Maugham wrote a great deal during his long life (ninety plus years) and some of it now seems dated, cranky and narrow but in the best of his works – short stories too numerous to name; the wonderful autobiography-meditation, The Summing Up; the travel book, Gentleman in the Parlor; the novels, Of Human Bondage, Cakes and Ale, Moon and Sixpence and the aforementioned The Razor’s Edge – it has always seemed to me that he created a world and a way of viewing that world that has been equaled by few writers.

Maugham always makes the art of expressing oneself seem so effortless that it always takes me a moment to realize the complexity of what is being expressed. This time, I said to myself as I once again opened my much read copy of Razor’s Edge, I will focus on how he accomplishes the magic trick, but alas, after fifty pages, Maugham’s gift of indirection (storytelling) has me looking just where he wants me to look, and once again I’ve missed the effort and am left with the artistry.

All right, you say, but what’s the book about? You know, after reading it five or six times I can only say: it’s about life. I guess I’ll have to read it once more.

Oh, and the book group loved the book, even those readers who feel that reading fiction is a punishment inflicted by liberals who mostly live in New York City. I didn’t say, "I told you so" to the group, but I’m saying it now.