Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Gass, William H. - Steven Moore (review date Spring 1995)

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Steven Moore (review date Spring 1995)

SOURCE: A review of The Tunnel, in Review of Contemporary Fiction, Vol. 15, No. 1, Spring, 1995, pp. 159-60.

[In the following review, Moore offers high praise for The Tunnel.]

I'm grateful that I lived long enough to see this. For nearly thirty years Gass has been publishing sections of The Tunnel in literary journals (including this one) and as fine press books, and as I devoured these I wondered, as many did, when and if the finished book would appear and whether the whole would be greater than its parts. That question has now been answered beyond my wildest expectations; The Tunnel is a stupendous achievement and obviously one of the greatest novels of the century, a novel to set beside the masterpieces of Proust, Joyce, and Musil as well as those of Gass's illustrious contemporaries. Although he has been grouped over the years with such novelists as Pynchon, Gaddis, Coover,...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. Richard J. Schneider (review date Winter 1979-1980)
   2. Charles Caramello (essay date 1983)
   3. Charlotte Byrd Hadella (essay date Fall 1988)
   4. Kevin J. H. Dettmar (essay date Fall 1991)
   5. Reginald Dyck (essay date Fall 1991)
   6. Arthur M. Saltzman (essay date Fall 1991)
   7. Philip Stevick (essay date Fall 1991)
   8. Robert Kelly (review date 26 February 1995)
   9. Merle Rubin (review date 6 March 1995)
   10. Michael Dirda (review date 12 March 1995)
   11. Michael Silverblatt (review date 19 March 1995)
   12. John Leonard (review date 20 March 1995)
   13. Steven Moore (review date Spring 1995)
   14. Gary Percesepe (review date Summer 1995)
   15. Louis Menand (review date 13 July 1995)
   16. Jim Lewis (review date February 1997)
   17. Maureen Howard (review date 9 March 1997)
   18. John O'Brien (review date Spring 1997)
   19. Marcus Klein (essay date Summer 1997)
   20. Kenneth Haynes (review date Fall 1997)
   21. Arthur Saltzman (review date Fall 1998)
   22. James Wood (review date 1 November 1998)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright