A remarkable novel, The Twyborn Affair is set in a villa on the Riviera, a ranch in Australia's Snowy Mountains, and a London whorehouse. White charts the transmigration of a soul from Eudoxia to Eddie to Eadith. Although its concerns are kaleidoscopic, The Twyborn Affair's main obsession is with identity: masculine/feminine, colonial/metropolitan, bourgeois/bohemian are just a few of the angles from which White views his subject. The writing is vivid, painterly in its attention to landscape, and remorseless in the dissection of social conventions. This book is sometimes bitterly funny, often moving, but never sentimental.