[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, Barth, and Elkin, he didn't have a novel in the same league as Gravity's Rainbow, J R, The Public Burning. LETTERS, or George Mills. His first two books of fiction, Omensetter's Luck and In the Heart of the Heart of the Country, are exquisite achievements, but more along the lines of V. and Pricksongs and Descants, respectively. Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife is a brilliant tour de force, but at 64 pages hardly qualifies as a novel. But now with The Tunnel Gass has a novel that rivals, perhaps even surpasses those meganovels of his colleagues; it was never a competition, but Gass is now unquestionably in the heavyweight division.

At this early date, and within this limited space, only a bird's-eye view can be given of such a complex novel. So: it's 1967 and a Midwestern history professor has finally finished writing his magnum opus, Guilt and Innocence in Hitler's Germany. All that remains is to write the introduction, but instead he begins to write about his own life, which becomes the first-person novel we're reading. Fat and fifty-something, William Frederick Kohler is a bitter man, but a literate one, and as he pours out his litany of complaint and disappointment he erects a great cathedral of rhetoric, “un livre intérieur, as Proust puts it,” as Kohler puts it. A professional lifetime spent studying Nazism—in a rash moment while studying in Germany in the 1930s, Kohler even participated in Kristallnacht—has led him to brood on “the fascism of the heart,” both his own and his family's. Such brooding hovers over his childhood in Iowa, his student years in Germany, and his married and professional life in Indiana. It's a novel about history, about hatred, about unhappiness.

But above all it's a novel about language, about a life in language. At an early age Kohler gave up poetry for history, but poetry marked him for her own and dictates every word he utters. Kohler's powerful, polyphonic prose interrogates and illuminates every aspect of his miserable life, and in this regard The Tunnel resembles other huge, word-mad novels (Under the Volcano, Visions of Cody, Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, Mulligan Stew, Darconville's Cat) where rhetorical energy and excess redeem personal failure and emptiness. The sheer beauty and bravura of Gass's sentences are overwhelming, breathtaking; the novel is a pharaoh's tomb of linguistic treasures. At one point Kohler's wife Martha demands: “tell it straight—the way it is, not what it's like.” Kohler wants to tell what it has been like to live his life, hence his impassioned use of metaphors, symbols, tropes, allusions. As a result, language is not merely foregrounded here but given a life of its own: “My father is dressed in a thick green woodman's plaid wool shirt, so heavy with adjectives he can hardly lift his arms.” Like Willie Masters, the pages are adorned with typographical devices, illustrations, different fonts, and special effects. Readers who, like the wife, prefer their prose straight are advised to look elsewhere.

It will takes years of study to excavate fully the artistry of The Tunnel, and I can't think of another novel of recent years more deserving of such attention. This is truly one of the great books of our time.