Reading Somerset Maugham's The Razor's Edge

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I've just finished reading Somerset Maugham's novel, The Razor's Edge. What a cunning writer Maugham could be! Here's how the book begins:

I have never begun a novel with more misgiving. If I call it a novel it is only because I don't know what else to call it. I have little story to tell and I end neither with a death nor a marriage.

The narrator is Somerset Maugham himself, and he promises a shapeless and meandering novel. 

He lies. The story is ostensibly about a young man who returns traumatized from WWI and refuses to become the respectable businessman all the world, his girlfriend included, desires him to be. Instead, he seeks to solve the mysteries of life. His story is told seemingly piecemeal, with an "I'll tell you about that later," and "Here's what I learned years later happened then," here and there, to disguise the fact that it's structurally brilliant. Along the way, he portrays entire lives: Of a rich, social climbing snob, of an All-American girl who becomes a hideous product of her society, of a woman's willful and understandable dive into debauchery.  All of them fascinating and, after having his satiric fun with them, most of them likeable underneath. 

Three quarters of the way through the book, Maugham begins a chapter by writing:

I feel it right to warn the reader that he can very well skip this chapter without losing the thread of such story as I have to tell, since for the most part it is nothing more than the account of a conversation that I had with Larry. I should add, however, that except for this conversation I should perhaps not have thought it worth while to write this book.

Isn't that wonderful? Who, reading that, could not read the rest of that chapter? 

What makes this particularly cunning is that it comes at the opening of a chapter that many would have decided to skim, midway through. Similarly, Maugham has been guiding the reader through a very complicated weaving of story all the way through, while denying any such intention.

At the end, the master trickster rings in the ending that he stated at the beginning he didn't have. It's satisfying. But I think he's lying again. I think what the books is really about it...

But I've run out of space. Buy me a drink next time you see me, and I'll tell you all.

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