Of Human Bondage
Maugham's largely autobiographical 1915 novel, the book that fixed his reputation and the one he called his greatest. It follows Philip Carey, an orphaned clubfooted boy, from a stifling vicarage through bohemian Paris to medical London and a ruinous obsession with the waitress Mildred. Theodore Dreiser hailed it on publication as a work of genius, and it endures as the model English Bildungsroman of disillusionment. The Modern Library ranked it among the century's hundred best novels, and its closing meditation on a meaningless life as a self-made pattern remains one of fiction's coldest, clearest consolations.
Philip is “one of the least likable protagonists” readers can name, self-pitying and slow to learn, fixing on the wrong person and then doing it again. Across 600-plus pages they point at the art-school and philosophy stretches as the 150 to 200 that could go, filled with “endless narration and exposition, accompanied by little dialog.” Mildred divides them: devastating to some, to others “unattractive, rude, selfish and fundamentally stupid” with nothing underneath, which makes the obsession hard to credit. And Maugham’s “class snobbery is getting the better of him” in how he draws her against Philip’s own set.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
