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I may not be able to tell a post-impressionist painter from a post hole digger, but if I see a painting by Paul Gauguin I can usually identify it correctly.

W. Somerset Maugham’s 1919 novel about fictional artist Charles Strickland is loosely based on the life of the French painter, but let’s be honest, even though this is a novel and something of a caricature, it is the slings and arrows of Gauguin’s outrageous life that make this so damn entertaining.

That and Maugham’s gifted writing and his deft ability to describe human emotion and to add impressionistic detail to complex relationships. Maugham’s dialogue, always good, is here almost Dickensian in its narrative quality. There are several scenes that were hypnotic, drawing the reader into an exchange between two characters.

Maugham introduces us to Charles Strickland, an English stockbroker who leaves his wife and children to move to Paris to learn to paint and to realize his dream, late in life, of being an artist. Told in first person observations about Strickland over the course of many years, we follow Strickland’s roguish adventures to Tahiti where his mastery is recognized.

But Maugham describes a complicatedly simple man who just wants to live in his work. Undesiring of money or fame, he simply wants to create and to express his artistic vision. His philosophy, appearing on the surface to be hedonistic and misanthropic, is more than an esoteric isolation from society but is an all-encompassing, passionate devotion to his work.

This is not a biography of Gauguin, but more of an examination of the spirit of his life, similar to how the Post-Impressionists extended Impressionism while rejecting its limitations, using symbolism and abstraction to depict its subject.

For Maugham readers, art lovers and the rest of us: a good book.