Half-Life: A New Biography of Lawrence Durrell

I have not run into them so often lately, but Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet and its constituent novels (Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, and Clea) were once among the paperbacks often to be found on the shelves of used bookstores and some of your better upstairs bedrooms. Products of an ambitious late Modernist moment, they joined projects of similar scope—Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet, Anthony Powell’s Proustian Dance to the Music of Time—and often shared the company of other works of postwar fiction understood as serious: the early novels of Iris Murdoch and William Golding. They were also rumored to be racy, in the manner of, but somehow less scandalous than, the Henry Miller novels that also gathered in used bookshops. My own copy of Justine was part of a handful I bought on the cheap during the summer after my freshman year in college, along with a pocket-size copy of Golding’s The Spire. (No Miller books in that haul.) After many moves, these are both still on a shelf in my office.