QUARTET <i> by Jean Rhys (Carroll & Graf: $7.95) </i>

The people in Jean Rhys’ brittle novel, originally published in 1929, are as stilted and artificial as the figures in an Erte lithograph. When her husband is arrested for selling stolen artworks, Marya, an Englishwoman living in Paris, is taken in by an Anglo-German couple, the Heidlers. This hospitable gesture soon develops into a romantic polygon that alternates between a triangle and a square. (As all four of them are too languidly world-weary to do much more than drink and complain about how unhappy they are, it’s difficult to imagine them ever consummating a relationship.) The characters in “Quartet” suggest that the members of “la generation perdue” remained lost less through alienation than a lack of initiative.