Patrick White is a novelist who degrades his characters and disconcerts his readers. He mercilessly probes, picks, peers, sniffs at his creations, who ignominiously writhe while we squirm. One routine debasement he inflicts on them is food; the unappetizing digestive ordeal is an expression of the existential ordeal all endure in White's seamy world…. Instead of fulfillment, they feel discomfort after feeding and they fart. Imprisoned in flesh, White's characters voraciously seek a spirit of love in the world to lighten their lives, but they never find it. The best they manage is to expel the fetid spirit within, for momentary but hardly exalting relief—and that does little to inspire love in those near them. Unsavory displays of these bodily functions (and others) crammed into large books also do little to encourage readers, even hardy ones.

The protagonist of The Twyborn Affair is among the more bizarre...