[In the following review, Kelly provides summary analysis of The Tunnel, which he describes as “an infuriating and offensive masterpiece.”]

If you want to go down into the self, you'd better go armed to the teeth. Paul Valéry says that somewhere, and it was what came to mind as I began reading The Tunnel, this huge and long-awaited novel by William H. Gass, the masterpiece, one must presume, of this 70-year-old American master.

A middle-aged professor of history at a Midwestern university takes to going down into the cellar of his big middle-class house, away from his unloved, undesired, unloving wife. He starts tunneling down through the floor and out beyond the foundations, lying on his fat belly and squirming past trowelfuls of clay and dirt and dust on his way out. He is escaping from his life.

That is the operative metaphor of this 652-page book, yet in only a few of its many chapters is the actual tunneling presented in ordinary narrative space as ordinary narrated event. Mostly the book is remembrance, invective and expostulation, along with lewd instances and merry excuses, and the tunnel remains just a motif, a poetic image occasionally stumbled into in the midst of other things. All the things, in fact, that Mr. Gass has provided his professor with in the way of the arms and weapons he will need to dig out of his life. As we know, and not just from Freud and other psychoenterologists, the only way to dig out of your life is to dig through it. So the professor talks from the middle of his life, backward, forward, remembering a furtive love life that is mostly skin and spurt, the nasty trivial obsessions of academic life, his horrible home.

The Tunnel is maddening, enthralling, appalling, coarse, romantic, sprawling, bawling. It is driven by language and all the gloriously phony precisions the dictionary makes available. It is not a nice book. It will have enemies, and I am not sure after one reading (forgive me, it's a big book) that I am not one of them. Let me tell you what I can.

There was a little boy, an only child, raised in a bleak Midwestern town by an alcoholic mother and a verbally brutal father. It would not take a Dickens to borrow the reader's sympathy and show us the little boy's suffering, his slow escape from that abusive milieu, and to delicately sketch the paths of liberty the boy might find, or the hopeless mire into which he might, reader signing, fall back.

But that is not William Gass's way. Instead, he leaps ahead half a century and gives us the sex-besotted, verbally brutal professor the boy becomes, a gross character with fascist views and a taste for sly affairs with his students. He gives us the thick of the man, the dirt to tunnel through. To get, if we get, at last to the truth of him. In fact, it is not till more than 600 pages into the book that we learn anything like the full particulars of the boy's youth. And when we get there, it is only to doubt that history is any more meaningful when it reveals origins than when it displays the blood and ordure of results.

Our professor of history is William Kohler (the name reminds us of plumbing fixtures), who occupies a wooden chair once held by his teacher, a German scholar named Tabor, who introduced him to the dangerous paths of history-by-paradox, to the historian as the creator of history. A loud know-it-all, Kohler began his academic career with a treatise that seemed to deny the probity and necessity of the Nuremberg Trials. Kohler has now crowned his work with a massive study called “Guilt and Innocence in Hitler's Germany,” among the typescript pages of which he interleaves the pages he is writing, the ones we seem to be reading. The novel is then to be understood as the hidden, personal expression of that mind that publicly announces itself in a strange study of the range of German innocence.

Once I tried to write a novel in the voice of someone I detested, while still engaging the reader's fellow feeling. Alas, it was all too easy. And the reader found it all too easy to accept my monster as a hero. There is a trohison des clercs not confined to historians and political analysts. Novelists and poets too can commit the treason of the intellectuals. Kohler's whole existence, his operatic self-pity, the very articulateness of his self-justifications, affront our sense of right and of intellectual responsibility. Yet this is where the satiric novelist works best, exploring this plausible monster, our shadow man.

In creating such a character, Mr. Gass avails himself of classic arms of modernism: allusion, puzzle, style as flesh, language as fable. In those particulars he will not at all disappoint the readers who were so excited by his stories (“In the Heart of the Heart of the Country”) a quarter-century ago, his novel Omensetter's Luck, the enthralling essays of On Being Blue, and, closest in many ways to the book at hand, that nonpareil shimmer of text and image in the novella Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife, a foretaste of what we find in The Tunnel.

But here the typographical games seem (unlike those in the novella) playful rather than evocative. And while Mr. Gass uses some devices Georges Perec or Harry Mathews might wield as strategies of composition, or grids of meaning, here the devices seem decorative, not so much claims on the reader's puzzle-solving faculties as rewards to the writer for going on, allowing himself some smutty doggerel after a night's hard noveling.

The real structure of the novel seems episodic, spasmodic, and thus apt enough for tunneling and boweling along. The first 50 pages or so are hard going, a Wagnerian wash of false starts, motifs, recollections, anticipations. Music helps; the rhythmic pressure of his language is seductive and bears along ever-interesting images and ideas. So much stuff in this novel! Old High Overdo is spoken here, burgessing and rabelaising; a favorite trick for a Gassian paragraph is to be a list of items rhythmically, sometimes even rhymingly, thrown together.

We first strike steady narrative with a splendid bravura chapter on the childhood town. We follow page after page of nostalgic detail through beautifully circumstanced streets, until slowly we realize that in all this Joycean summoning there is no one present except a plump little lonely boy, all alone in an unpeopled town. And that sets the measure of the book. This is a book about a monstrously lonely man, and how he makes himself so.

For the first few hundred pages not one of the few characters says anything at all except about the narrator. They have no selves except what they say about Willie young or old. The narrator has engulfed their reality, made their words his own.

Martha, his wife; Tabor, his teacher; his oddly-named colleagues in the Nabokovian history department; the imaginal (and maybe imaginary) Susu, with whom he has erotic escapades: lost Lou; fresh little Ru—all the u-girls of his life. We learn about these people, but few of them ever take on any kind of dimensionality, they are voices prodding, blaming, pleasing, leaving Willie.

All except Tabor. He's real enough. (He's usually called Mad Meg, after Bruegel's painting of the madwoman.) Kohler's mother is Margaret too, also a Meg, so the novel has two Mad Megs. Kohler winds up his youth by putting her into a madhouse. It's Tabor who sets Kohler off on his path of study—the darkest business of this novel—Hitler and the Holocaust.

In one of the strongest chapters in the book, Kohler goes through his own memories of researching Kristallnacht, the terrible first act in the war against the Jews, purportedly unleashed in response to the assassination in Paris of a German diplomat by an enraged Jew. Mr. Gass interweaves Kohler's studies of himself and his own reactions (of course) and his debunking guesses about the unethical motives of the assassin, with paragraphs ostensibly recording the memories of someone who actually took part in attacking the Jews.

The horror here and throughout The Tunnel is the way history is personalized, the plight of any individual equated with the plight of nations. The theory of Kohler's treatise seems to be something like this: Hitler was a wimp and couldn't have done a thing by himself; it was the massive resentment of the German people that did his work. So the German people are guilty, and the Nazis curiously innocent—dreamers who chanced to dream out loud and cause a 12-year riot of destruction.

What Kohler makes of this is a Party of Disappointed People, a PdP to match Hitler's NSDAP (the Nazi Party). All through The Tunnel we find cartoons, jokes, party platform planks, regalia, for this party of the resentful, the envious, the spiteful, the bigoted. (There is even a long chapter in defense of bigotry.) But like the central metaphor of the tunnel itself, the PdP never gets anywhere. It is never narrated, just thought about, played with. Its flags are funny, its party fez is a treat. But its implications are horrendous. Hitler was just a joke; it's the people who did it.

I can't imagine William Gass believing this, any more than I can believe that the Vorticist novelist and painter Wyndham Lewis (whom Mr. Gass often interestingly resembles in daring and despondency) really doubted that the Jews were human. The risk is the representation. One offers a character, and the character is taken as a man, then as a hero. When Kohler, speaking of his own resentment, remarks about Hitler, “I would have followed him just to get even,” one senses maybe a comic exaggeration and tries to keep going. But when in the course of his endless bitter reflections on his failed marriage, Kohler exclaims “I've been in bedrooms as bad as Belsen,” we recognize only iniquitous nonsense. There is no bedroom as bad as Belsen, and to say so is to signal that you do not know what Belsen is.

In whose hands are we as we read? Much of the time, we revel in the sheer glory of Mr. Gass's phenomenal prose style, his unflagging energy, in a prose that seems to embrace and swallow everything and make all things alive with interest. He can touch the secret waters of childhood, and spell out (in a beautiful chapter called “Do Rivers”) the delicate silence of the body after love. But in the same invented character we keep coming up against raw bitterness, bigotries no fresher than Archie Bunker, intolerably lighthearted deployment of Nazi vileness.

While it is impressive that a novelist can pull off the tricks of creating such a sexist, bigoted, hate-filled character and of making the reader accept his vision of the real, there is a risk, one that every satirist takes. The risk is being believed, taken literally. To this day, we tend to think Jonathan Swift loathed humankind on the strength of Gulliver's aversion. William Gass takes the risk, and it is no small achievement to make us take our bearings from Swift and Wyndham Lewis and those magniloquent sourpusses Louis-Ferdinand Celine and Samuel Beckett, ghosts who seem to hover, as James Joyce does too, over this novel. But it is not much comfort to lay aside this infuriating and offensive masterpiece and call it a satire, as if a genre could heal the wounds it so delights to display. It will be years before we know what to make of it.