Gifted, energetic ("The Twyborn Affair" is a 10th novel) and Nobel-belaureled, Australia's Patrick White is still no household word in literary America—but that could be about to change. His books hitherto have tended to focus on characters—among them a 19th-century explorer, family-builders obsessed with "the land," aging residents of Parranugli and Sarsaparilla, imaginary Australian suburbs—a shade removed from late 20th-century preoccupations along our shores. But "The Twyborn Affair" is a different show. It's a case study of sexual proteanism, and the thematic core is the mystery of human identity….

Books by Patrick White offer substantial pleasures. They're written, to begin with, as opposed to piped in, punched up or dictated; they're composed in an individually ironic style in which astringency and sensuousness wittily test each other's limits in sentences that repay alert reading. Minor characters … are precisely observed, as are settings, which have striking range…. Mr. White's literary world is one in which nothing goes unimagined…. (p. 3)

Despite many pleasures, though, "The Twyborn Affair" doesn't strike me, finally, as a wholly satisfying novel. The problem is the book's too unremitting scorn of human attachment. Feeling flows awkwardly between reader and characters partly because for long stretches it's hard to tell who's who. (The relationship of "Eudoxia" to "Eddie" is masked for well over 100 pages.) Nor does feeling flow easily between the characters themselves—even those connected by blood or by protestations of interest in one another. Eddie and his parents are ceaselessly wary when together, detached and noncommunicating. A similar mutual distancing afflicts other pairs in the book—Eddie's mother and the heiress she teases toward rebellion, Eddie himself and male and female lovers, every husband and wife. And while one or two figures do approach the edge of expressive breakthrough, the circumstances are contrived to render their nascent tenderness and vulnerability faintly repugnant. (pp. 3, 32)

Reserve has its uses in Nobelists as elsewhere…. And the constriction noticeable in "The Twyborn Affair" isn't—contrary to some recent carping by English critics—a norm in this author's oeuvre. (Mr. White's "The Tree of Man," for instance, is a work of memorable emotional power.) The point worth making is merely that in this outing Patrick White is exploring an extremely slippery characterological realm. In protean country, as Proteus's own story confirms, most figures are as hard to be touched by as to touch. (p. 32)

At a time when books are beginning to be as expensive as beluga, Patrick White offers rare value for money. Dense, a bit salty, and too rich to consume all at once, his novels are undoubtedly an acquired taste, but one that affords some unusual pleasures. The Twyborn Affair is one of the best: a long, technically complex story loosely based on the Tiresias legend, it is not quite like anything else—except, perhaps, another Patrick White novel.

The book is divided into three sections, each of which concerns one of the incarnations of an Australian whose sexual identity is as elusive as his/her psychic identity. White's most obvious achievement here is to make this 'twice-born" creature believable, first as the neurotic young consort of a crazy Greek, then as a fresh-faced jackeroo in the outback, and finally as the exquisitely masochistic madam of a classy London whorehouse. More subtly, he manages to convince us of an underlying continuity of self that links these personas together, even though that self is tenuous in the extreme.

For a novel concerned with the interplay or, more often, the conflict between love and sex, The Twyborn Affair is remarkably free of both sentiment and titillation. Its strength rests on White's splendidly evocative use of language, especially in describing landscape, and on his ability to combine a sardonic view of the world with a contradictorily inclusive compassion.

This is a long, difficult novel requiring a herculean effort of patience. Then too, those who object to extravagance, as well as those who prefer neat endings (or at least summary illuminations), will be disappointed. But readers who enjoy an occasional fling in a world to which they are unaccustomed will find The Twyborn Affair much to their liking.