If love is the core of reality, as Patrick White says it is at a key point in [The Twyborn Affair], then sex is its several masks, fitting perfectly only on the rarest occasions and more often disguising, distorting and demeaning love. The relationship between self and sex, and sex as a mode of access to reality, are two themes glossed and dramatized [here]….

The novel firmly establishes the differences between [the protagonist's various personas] while it keeps buoyant the necessary tension between the wounded individuality of the protagonist and the experimental images which represent it. White succeeds—a remarkable feat—in balancing what Coleridge described as the two instincts in human nature, the instinct to pass out of self into images of self, and the instinct to resist the usurpation of the self by anything from the outside.

The other success in the novel is the brilliant evocation of place, whether the gleaming landscapes of the Mediterranean, the stark ones of Monaro, or the gloomy ones of London. There is consonance between each place and the character of the hero/heroine at a given phase. More than this, the unity of the character is sustained by a profound and persuasive sense of the beauty and significance of place…. One part of White's aim is to establish the real human being beneath the fictions he takes part in. The other is to show the appalling solitariness of the human person "who can experience nothing important unless he is alone" and the simultaneous melting of categories, the dissolution of boundaries and edges which the living of life entails.

There is no diminution, then, in the powers of Patrick White…. This novel is impressive in its conception, astonishing in its concreteness, sharp in its sardonic social discriminations, and rich in its use of the resources of language. The weakness is the accustomed one: a certain florid condition of the sensibility which allows flourishes of melodrama—of which there are several in the London scenes—and an intermittent overtness of symbolism…. There is also an aptness on occasion to ignore the liberty of the subject and to make some characters … into stock figures cramped by the author's a priori purposes.

Not the best, nor the worst, not a Voss nor a Riders in the Chariot, perhaps something between The Vivisector and The Eye of the Storm, The Twyborn Affair still has about it a creative glow and a capacity to deal with the depths and the distances of human psyche.