The Tunnel (Gass novel)

Based on Wikipedia: The Tunnel (Gass novel)

Twenty-Six Years in the Making

William H. Gass spent twenty-six years writing a single novel. Not revising. Not polishing. Writing. From start to finish, The Tunnel consumed more than a quarter century of his creative life before finally appearing in 1995.

The result was something critics couldn't agree on at all. Steven Moore called it "a stupendous achievement and obviously one of the greatest novels of the century." Robert Alter, writing in The New Republic, dismissed it as "a bloated monster of a book." Robert Kelly, reviewing it for the New York Times Book Review, threw up his hands entirely: "It will be years before we know what to make of it."

Three decades later, we're still figuring that out.

A Book Hidden Inside Another Book

The premise sounds deceptively simple. William Frederick Kohler is a history professor at an unnamed Midwestern university. He has just finished his life's work: an objective, thoroughly researched academic study called Guilt and Innocence in Hitler's Germany. All he needs to write is the introduction.

But the introduction spirals out of control. Instead of introducing his scholarly work, Kohler starts writing something else entirely—a brutally honest, subjective confession of his own life. The academic introduction transforms into a secret autobiography he calls The Tunnel.

Here's where it gets strange. Kohler becomes terrified that his wife Martha will discover these pages, which contain his cruelest thoughts about her and their marriage. So he hides them. He takes the pages of his confession and tucks them inside the manuscript of his legitimate academic book. The hidden text literally nestles within the respectable text.

And then Kohler starts digging an actual tunnel.

In his basement, he breaks through the cement floor, reaches a layer of cobblestones, and begins excavating in secret. The dirt he removes gets hidden in the drawers of his wife's antique furniture collection. The metaphor couldn't be more obvious—he's burrowing into himself while concealing the evidence of his excavation—yet Gass makes it feel unsettling rather than heavy-handed.

The Test at the Door

Gass was explicit about not wanting casual readers. In a 1995 radio interview, he explained that the novel's deliberately difficult opening sections serve as "a test of competency." The epigraph from the ancient Greek philosopher Anaxagoras sets the tone: "The descent to hell is the same from every place."

This wasn't cruelty for its own sake, Gass argued. He called it a standard modernist technique, a way to ensure "that the person who gets into the book is ready and deserves to be there." The difficulty also establishes the range of demands the book will make. Fair warning, in other words. If the first fifty pages exhaust you, the next six hundred will be worse.

What demands does the book make? Consider just the visual elements. Gass constructs images out of text itself—a window made of words, a Star of David formed from typography. He includes actual drawings, pictures, and watermarks. Pages are designed to look like paper sacks. Business cards interrupt the narrative. This is a novel that requires you to look as well as read.

The Unreliable Monster

Kohler is not a sympathetic narrator. He's not even a likeable one.

The novel contains a scene where Kohler, as a young father, becomes violent toward his infant son because he cannot stop the baby's crying. Later, he strangles his wife's cat on instinct when it surprises him in the tunnel, then buries the body in one of Martha's wardrobes. His confession includes his most cutting assessments of his wife. His university is investigating him for sexual advances toward a female student.

And yet Kohler is a scholar of Nazi guilt and innocence. He spent his career studying the Holocaust. His mentor, Magus Tabor—nicknamed "Mad Meg"—was a Nazi collaborator whose chair Kohler now literally occupies. The question of how ordinary people participate in monstrous systems isn't abstract for Kohler. It's personal.

This creates what critic Robert Alter identified as the novel's central problem. Is Gass critiquing Kohler or is he complicit with him? The author stands behind the narrator like a ventriloquist, Alter argued, "presumably committed to humane, democratic values. But those values are nowhere intimated in the book." The critical distance that should separate novelist from monster keeps collapsing.

Whether that's a flaw or the point depends entirely on what you think novels are for.

The Party of Disappointed People

Buried within Kohler's confession is something he invented: a fictional political party called the Party of Disappointed People. He's created not just a name but an entire ideology, complete with flags, logos, and symbols. The PdP recurs throughout the book as a motif.

Kohler claims his mentor Mad Meg is the spiritual founder of this movement. What exactly does the Party of Disappointed People believe? The novel never quite says directly. But the name itself suggests a politics built on resentment, on the feeling that life has failed to deliver what was promised. It's a politics that leads nowhere good. Think of all the actual political movements that have channeled disappointment into destruction.

This invented party lets Gass explore how fascism germinates in ordinary dissatisfaction. Kohler isn't a Nazi. He's an American professor who studies Nazis. But his disappointments—with his marriage, his career, his body, his choices—curdle into something that rhymes with what he studies.

A Novel Published in Pieces

During those twenty-six years, Gass wasn't keeping the work entirely to himself. Sections of The Tunnel appeared in literary journals throughout the 1970s and 1980s, each one a glimpse of the growing whole.

"Mad Meg" appeared in the Iowa Review in 1976. "Why Windows are Important to Me" showed up in Tri-Quarterly in 1982. "Culp" was published in Grand Street in 1984. "The Sunday Drive" ran in Esquire that same year. Readers who followed literary magazines could track the novel's development across decades, like watching a cathedral being built one facade at a time.

The publication history itself became legendary. Gass originally contracted with Ticknor and Fields, a Boston publisher with a distinguished pedigree dating back to the nineteenth century. But when Gass finally delivered the completed manuscript in 1993, they changed their minds. Dalkey Archive Press, a small publisher specializing in experimental fiction, asked to take it on, but Gass's agent sold it instead to Knopf, the prestigious Random House imprint.

Then Knopf let it go out of print after just a few years. Dalkey Archive finally got their chance, reissuing the novel in paperback and later producing an audiobook—all thirty-plus hours of it—read by Gass himself in St. Louis in 2005.

The Structure of Descent

The novel's 652 pages divide into twelve sections. Each one operates as a kind of archaeological layer, which makes sense given that Kohler is literally digging into the earth while figuratively digging into his past.

The first section introduces Kohler's scholarly work and his obsession with sitting—he contemplates what it means to spend most of a working life in a chair. Not just any chair, but the chair that belonged to his Nazi-collaborator mentor. Already the past is pressing up through the present like bones surfacing from soil.

Section two opens with something absurd: a compilation of excuses from Kohler's students. Why they didn't do the reading. Why the paper is late. The banality of academic life gives way to Kohler's literary preferences—Proust, Thomas Mann, D.H. Lawrence, Rilke—and then to childhood memories. A walk to Market Street. The books he loved as a boy. Mad Meg's lectures echoing through time.

The pattern establishes itself. Present irritations trigger past recollections. Teaching leads to being taught. The student excuses remind him of his own relationship to authority. Nothing stays in one time period for long.

Culp and His Limericks

Among Kohler's colleagues, the most memorable is Charles Culp, who writes obscene limericks. But Culp isn't just a crude joker. He's attempting something absurdly ambitious: a complete history of the world written in limerick form.

The limerick, for those who haven't encountered one in a while, is a five-line poem with an AABBA rhyme scheme and a bouncing rhythm that almost forces comedy. It's the form of bawdy jokes and nonsense verse. Imagine trying to capture the fall of Rome or the French Revolution in that format.

Gass includes many of Culp's efforts in the novel. The effect is both funny and disturbing. History reduced to dirty jokes. The Holocaust rendered in punchlines. What starts as comedy becomes another way the book interrogates how we process atrocity. Do we diminish horror by making it entertaining? Or is the only honest response to recognize that we do diminish it, that we can't actually hold the weight of history in our minds?

Susu and the Limits of Sympathy

One of Kohler's youthful loves was a woman named Susu, a gypsy lounge singer. She committed atrocities against Jews during World War Two. The Nazis eventually executed her.

Think about that for a moment. Kohler romanticizes a war criminal. She's not presented as a monster but as a lost love, someone he invokes with longing. She was beautiful. She could sing. She also participated in genocide.

This is what Alter meant about the collapse of critical distance. Kohler doesn't excuse Susu exactly, but he aestheticizes her. Her crimes become part of her tragic glamour. And Gass gives us Kohler's perspective without clearly marking where we should resist it. Are we supposed to be horrified that Kohler feels this way? Or are we being shown something true about how memory works, how we can hold tenderness and knowledge of evil in the same mental space?

Kristallnacht and Ambiguity

Kohler was in Germany as a student during Kristallnacht—the Night of Broken Glass in November 1938, when Nazi mobs attacked Jewish homes, businesses, and synagogues across Germany and Austria. Thousands of windows shattered. Dozens died. It was the public beginning of what would become the Holocaust.

But Kohler's participation in that night remains ambiguous. The novel doesn't clarify whether he was an observer, a bystander, or something worse. This uncertainty is crucial. Kohler the scholar has spent his career studying guilt and innocence. Kohler the man may carry guilt he never examines directly.

The ambiguity extends to the reader. We don't know what Kohler did. We can't judge him definitively. We're left suspended in the same moral uncertainty that the novel explores as a historical phenomenon. How do we assign guilt when memory is unreliable and narrators lie?

Windows as Philosophy

The sixth section of the novel meditates on windows. Not metaphorical windows—actual windows, of various types. What they reveal. What they conceal. How they frame vision.

This might sound like padding, but it connects to everything else in the book. Kohler looks at his life through frames. The window of academic objectivity. The window of confession. The window of memory, which shows us the past but always at a remove, always filtered through glass we can't quite see through clearly.

And of course there's the Star of David made of text near the beginning—a window shape formed from words, looking onto the void of the Holocaust.

The Last Section: Where Monsters Come From

The novel's final section turns to Kohler's parents. His father's crippling arthritis. His mother's descent into alcoholism. A twelve-year-old boy watching his family fall apart.

This is where Kohler explains how he turned from poetry to history. Childhood disillusionment killed his romantic sensibility. He needed facts, structures, the illusion of objectivity. But of course he didn't escape subjectivity at all. He just buried it, the way he buries the pages of his confession inside his academic work, the way he buries the tunnel dirt in his wife's furniture.

The portrait of his parents doesn't excuse Kohler. Understanding how someone became cruel doesn't make the cruelty acceptable. But it does something else, something the novel has been doing all along: it shows how damage travels through generations, how the family is another kind of tunnel, how we dig through our parents to reach ourselves.

Four and a Half Times Through

Michael Silverblatt, the Los Angeles Times critic, reported reading The Tunnel in its entirety four and a half times. Each reading, he wrote, revealed "its resonance and beauty so great as to demand another reading."

This might sound like masochism. Six hundred fifty-two pages of a repellent narrator's confession, read nearly five times. But Silverblatt's description of the experience captures something essential: "I found myself devastated by the thoroughness of the book's annihilating sensibility and revived by the beauty of its language."

Devastated and revived. That's the experience Gass seems to have designed. The content destroys you; the prose resurrects you. The meaning is nihilistic; the craft is life-affirming. You read about the worst of human nature in some of the best sentences the English language can produce.

Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, in his New York Times review, identified the same paradox. Why keep reading something so grim? For "the lyrical set pieces," he wrote, "the haunting evocations of a small-town childhood so sensually rich in detail that the prose is sometimes hypnotic."

The Tunnel That Goes Nowhere

Here's what Kohler never explains: where is his tunnel going?

He digs. He hides the dirt. He conceals the project from his wife. But there's no exit strategy, no destination. The tunnel isn't a means of escape. It's just digging for the sake of digging, descent without arrival.

This seems to be the point. Kohler's confession doesn't lead anywhere either. He doesn't achieve insight. He doesn't change. He just excavates himself, turning up dirt, making a mess, going nowhere. The tunnel is the opposite of progress. It's the shape of a life spent avoiding the surface, burrowing away from accountability, hiding the evidence in antique furniture.

And perhaps that's why the novel took twenty-six years to write. Some projects don't want to end. Some tunnels just keep extending, chamber after chamber, no light ahead.