The three narratives of [The Twyborn Affair] take place years and distances apart. Only inference, imagination, and Eddie's memories connect them. Yet they cling together with the intense reality—and counterbalancing romanticism—that authentic literature always asserts. In a précis White's novel is incredible. In total it's as believable as a nervous breakdown: a dazzlingly handsome, emotionally fractured young/middle-aged man does live as man/woman in The Twyborn—twice born?—Affair.

Patrick White breaks down disbelief. His characters conduct their lives and animate their emotions with our own confusions. [The novel is plainly] autobiographical, at least in part…. There may be something urgent about his extra-literary insights into homosexual behavior. But "love can never be conveyed except by the wrong gestures" and "anything wholly true—certainly in friendship—comes … from the woman in a man and the man in a woman" suggest his ambiguity. The essence of homosexuality in The Twyborn Affair is indecision, fear, flight.

Most homosexual fiction, like most deliberately heterosexual fiction, is propaganda. Not The Twyborn Affair…. While White's achievement is in making Eddie Twyborn so credible he pleads for sympathy, White's limit is in making him comprehensible. Indeed, White's explanations for Eddie's bizarre preferences limp back to conventional wisdom: butch mother, absent father, retreat into self. White gives us the condition of his character. One keeps looking through this extraordinary novel for his deepest source.