Julia, Theatre, a novel by Somerset Maugham

I picked this novel up a few years ago and then saw a dreadful film adaptation of it, called “Being Julia”.  

I enjoyed the novel as a short and a relatively easy pleasant read. However, on the negative side, while I don’t expect all characters in a book to be lovable, a book with no likable characters can be a bit off putting. There's really no-one in this book that I like or approve of, and they are only mildly interesting to me. Julia is an actress who "acts all the time"... and Maugham seems to agree with her son that really Julia doesn't exist. She was wildly in love with her husband Michael, when they met, and for a time, but then She fell out of love with him, and began to see his character as dull, complacent, cheap and pompous. Within a few years of marriage, she's bored with him and has gone off sex with him. She has a son, Roger, but he doesn't seem to mean much to her. He later tells her that she only ever saw him, (the son) as a pretty little boy she could be photographed with, who looked cute in pictures of the "actress as an adoring mother".  and it is hard to disagree with him about this.  She never comes across as being a mother at all.

Julia's predicaments are amusing, but even when she is unhappy it is hard to feel sorry for her. She falls in love with a much younger man, and they have an affair, which gives her a lot of pleasure and thrills. Yet even with this man, it is hard to see real affection. She buys him things and gives him money, but when he begins to grow a bit tired of the affair, she very nastily makes him realise that he is her "kept boy" and that she has power over him. She then finds that he has been seeing other women, younger ones...and has been boasting of how she "eats out of his hand". He's not a very nice character, but Julia then takes a revenge on his new girlfriend, a young actress who is working with her. 

It really is hard to like anyone in the book and while there is plenty to laugh at, there is a feeling that one's usually laughing at the characters rather than with them. Julia is devoted to her acting and we see her, having shrugged off her infatuation for Tom, her young lover, planning to play Hamlet...It’s nice to see a woman who isn't all the time depending on male admiration or affection but she is cold at heart and vulgar. Maugham claims to be fond of her, but the novel makes me feel a vulgar strain in his nature...

I loved Constant Wife, but this seems to show the other side of Maugham.. the catty side.. which seems to dislike women…