Somerset Maugham Does Penang
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            In the novel, the fictional Maugham is near bankruptcy after a disastrous investment failure, and he needs material for a new book to refill his coffers. Dissatisfied with his contentious, expensive wife Syrie Wellcome, he travels (with Gerald in tow) to Penang in search of inspiration. The trip provides him with enough material—unhappy marriages, infidelities, a Chinese revolutionary, and a murder and trial—to inform the six stories in his 1926 collection The Casuarina Tree. Like the stories in that collection, The House of Doors explores themes of race and caste, gender, sexuality, marriage, infidelity, duty, and the crumbling British empire.

      Maugham has arranged for a two-week stay in Penang with an old friend, Robert Hamlyn, an attorney that Maugham met during World War I, and his wife Lesley (along with Maugham, one of the book’s narrators). Maugham senses that all is not right in the Hamlyns’ marriage, and with a little prodding he convinces her to share her stories. He finds that he’s right about the Hamlyns. Both Robert and Lesley have had affairs—Lesley with Arthur, an associate of the real-life Chinese revolutionary Dr. Sun Yat Sen; Robert with a subordinate in his law office with whom he often traveled. Seeing a plot thickening, Maugham adjures Lesley and other acquaintances to tell more stories about their lives. Once she warms to Maugham and learns to trust him, Lesley provides her story of her affair with Arthur and her discovery of Robert’s affair with another man. She also relays all the salacious details of the murder trial of Ethel Proudlock, another real event of the time. Proudlock was convicted of savagely murdering her own adulterous paramour—an action that all of the coupled characters in the book probably had contemplated at least once—adding yet another infidelity gone wrong to the story.

            Throughout his career, Maugham denied being a “prose stylist.” In fact, in his 1926 short story “The Creative Impulse,” he satirized self-conscious stylists whose works aimed to please only the literati: “It was indeed a scandal that so distinguished an author, with an imagination so delicate and a style so exquisite, should remain neglected of the vulgar.” He preferred instead a short, plain, precise style. Summing up the general critical response to Maugham’s fiction, the critic Lee Wilson Dodd wrote: “Mr Maugham knows how to plan a story and carry it through. Competence is the word. His style is without a trace of imaginative beauty.” Perhaps Maugham’s preference for plain-spoken writing stemmed from his success as a playwright. At one point he had four plays mounted on West End stages at the same time. In his plays, he sought to create dialogue that sounded like real, unadorned conversation. A frequent criticism levied against Maugham was that his casual, colloquial speech sometimes devolved into clichés.

            In House, Tan skillfully mirrors that competent, lucid style. There are no frilly flights of descriptive prose, no subplots, no psychological probing, no distractions from the rather simple plot: A famous writer travels to an exotic land to collect tales from the natives and writes a collection of six stories that tell those tales. Lesley’s telling of the Proudlock murder trial story unfolds like any straightforward detective story. Thus, in both content and writing style, Tan has paid homage to Maugham as one of the masters of unadorned prose.