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...