In the novel, Strickland is depicted as profoundly flawed. “He never said a clever thing,” Maugham writes, “but he had a vein of brutal sarcasm which was not ineffective, and he always said exactly what he thought.” The book was radical in recognizing that artistic talent can be accompanied by a disturbing level of selfishness. Granted, the novel can seem dated in presenting the artistic life as a starkly binary choice between deranged genius and bourgeois contentment. It fails to notice that second-rate artists can be tormented, too.

Still, who can deny that novels about artists have certain advantages over straight biographies? While biographies routinely run to 700-plus fact-laden pages, a novel is more likely to be shapely in length. It will not waste your time with a dreary slog through a graveyard, which is how biographies traditionally begin, dutifully resurrecting long- forgotten ancestors whose relevance is not always clear. Moreover, a novel can offer an illusion of intimacy and lead you to dreamily think, “Here I am with Gauguin as he paces anxiously in his studio and wonders if that shade of orange is sufficiently bright.”

On the other hand, some of us turn to books less for escape than for critical analysis. And if you are reading for information, fictional biographies are obviously an inadequate form. As the biographer Robert A. Caro, speaking recently to writers and their supporters at a PEN American event, reminded us, “The more facts you come up with, the closer you come to whatever truth there is.”

The key word there is “closer,” because a biography, by definition, can never completely close in on every aspect of a life. It’s humbling when one tries to write a biography — when one confronts the gaping discrepancy between the ticking minutes of a lived life and the random piles of letters and articles, of airline tickets and other scraps of paper, that survive as documentation. A biography is a collection of puzzle pieces that do not fit, and the gaps can be as interesting as the connections. If you don’t like gaps, skip biography and read fiction.