Patrick White is a novelist who degrades his characters and disconcerts his readers. He mercilessly probes, picks, peers, sniffs at his creations, who ignominiously writhe while we squirm. One routine debasement he inflicts on them is food; the unappetizing digestive ordeal is an expression of the existential ordeal all endure in White's seamy world…. Instead of fulfillment, they feel discomfort after feeding and they fart. Imprisoned in flesh, White's characters voraciously seek a spirit of love in the world to lighten their lives, but they never find it. The best they manage is to expel the fetid spirit within, for momentary but hardly exalting relief—and that does little to inspire love in those near them. Unsavory displays of these bodily functions (and others) crammed into large books also do little to encourage readers, even hardy ones.

The protagonist of The Twyborn Affair is among the more bizarre characters that White [has produced]…. Surprisingly, White, who customarily manipulates uncongenial characters with varying degrees of disgust, graces this protagonist with his sympathy, and the changeable E. comes to life as a hapless fellow sufferer rather than a kinky phenomenon. What's more, White, who frequently discomfits readers with what seems to be gratuitous prying into sordid lives, does us the kindness of offering a glimpse of his motives…. Like his protagonist, White has both the "stern puritan" and the "savage nymphomaniac," the "moralist" and the "sensualist," the "nun" and the "whore" in him. He is divided between an aspiration toward a life of the spirit and a more riveting obsession with the debased life of the flesh, which together inspire him to yearning and loathing, high seriousness and irony, inflated prose and ruthlessly minute description.

Eudoxia/Eddie/Eadith Trist, "pseudo-man-cum-crypto-woman" in search of a true self and a glimpse of love, endures three lives of physical mortification. In prose as concrete and convolited as the matter it describes, White anatomizes the "material facade" that hides the "spiritual nakedness" within his protean character. Only the details of that facade change; its basic form remains the same. (pp. 37-8)

White's imagination garishly illuminates the depths of his character's psyche in Mrs. Trist, after scanning its less abysmal levels again and again through his long book. (He encloses his lurid description of her hell between parentheses, as she conceals her agony beneath thick make-up and behind locked doors.)…

It is difficult, but not impossible, to be still game enough to want to watch and care about this depraved, despairing bawd after some 400 often unpalatable pages. At his best White makes us, along with his characters, endure the foul truth of man's imperfectability with the irony and energy that can sustain hope against hope in the impossible prospect of final redemption. But all too often plain disgust overwhelms him and us. Thankfully, unlike his characters who are doomed to "everlasting torments," we can finish the book with a sigh of relief that the trials White so graphically and powerfully renders are over. (p. 38)