Perhaps the most baffling feature of Patrick White's awe-inspiring oeuvre is its persistent reliance on anomaly and paradox to define reality. It is no news that "things are seldom what they seem." But White is saying more: Precisely through their disguises shall we come to know them, and they, themselves. Where surfaces blur, the result is not so much confusion as illumination.

The Twyborn Affair … is an extraordinary novel of quest, an odyssey through place, time and especially gender—all three of which, by virtue of their boundaries, delimit and even alienate the individual from his possible selves. The gender transformations in this work serve two purposes: to allow for the "mingling process" of empathy and to discover the self—in the masculine to discover the feminine; in the female, the male. The book is divided into three parts that form a cyclical whole. We come full circle...