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...