Is "The Alexandria Quartet" as good as we all thought it was when we first read it more than 20 years ago? I wondered about this when I saw that Lawrence Durrell has a new novel, "Constance," coming out. Since nothing he published after the "Quartet" seemed to be in the same class, it occurred to me that we may have overestimated the books for which he is famous.

So I went back to the "Quartet"—like novelists, we have to keep revising ourselves—and read "Justine," the first volume. I want to say immediately that it struck me as even better this time. It is, among other things, one of the great city novels, reminding us of Dickens's London, Balzac's Paris, Joyce's Dublin. Such books have a quality for which the Germans should have a word—something like "city-hunger," or "city-angst," a human tropism which makes us huddle...